blah-feme

waspish grief

I am tormented by the impossibility of grieving in public. This is because I am a wasp, of the first order - that peculiar mousey type of wasp that finds even East-coast U.S. wasps rather loud and brash (this observation, by the way is meant to point up the craziness of my worldview, not a criticism of he American personality, whatever that might be). English wasps seem to favour a paired-down, silent, lonely model of grief. Alone with the night of the soul, private, 'at one' with one's feelings (or perhaps just sitting around for a while on empty).

My Italian colleague tells me that in Italy, people grieve together, sleep at each others' houses and eat and drink and feel together as a community, grieving very much in large groups. I find this such a lovely idea, but I know I would go mad with all the noise, all the overt weeping and wailing, the 'performativity' of it all.

Our way must seem so strange, so cold, so empty to him. I think it is precisely at times like this that I become who I really am - English with a capital E. This is not something that comforts me or makes me proud - quite the contrary. I feel as if gripped by a deadly quietude, a quietude that has haunted me most of my life. I am awkward in it, red-faced, uncomfortable with grieving, uncomfortable with grievers and I am dreading the public performativity of V's funeral, although ritual is absolutely right and I also know not to go would be the worst thing for me.  I must mark her passing in some way, even if I  feel  as dry as a twig, ready to snap under the strain of 'being in grief'.

My deadly quietude, something I hate and have sought to overcome most of my life is so profoundly at my core, so who I am, that I grieve with extraordinary silence. I find talking to others very hard, with the exception of A and P, who are both lovely and know what to say and what not to say.

I grieve, I think, as one who is utterly alone, and I cannot grieve any other way. A and P have struggled all week with others. They too have found the burden of being 'in grief' with others sometimes too much to bear, but they are brave enough to go out and face it. I admire them.

I have spent most of this week hiding under my duvet and only got up yesterday to feed my poor cat.

A few seedlings I planted in a seed tray 2 weeks ago have now impertinently germinated: I am so angry at them for daring to show their impudent stupid little heads.

I am feeling this more and more - deep resentment at everyone who walks past my window, at every laughter, at every smile, at every re-run of Friends.

Damn them all. Don't they know we've lost our V?

I know you're there (the great white shark speaks)

Occasionally (very rarely, in fact)  I am caught short by the extraordinarily intense mark of intention that makes itself felt in my writing. It is not that I seek this out or look to say, say and say in a way that is of or for 'me', but that, sometimes, very rarely, I am surprised by the strong impression of encountering myself talking back to me from the 'page'.

Quite why one passage should strike me like this and another doesn't is extremely difficult to ascertain. In such moments I am called to question the popular wisdom in enlightened liberal educational institutions that characterises the programme of education as enabling students to find their own voice.

This emphasis on the search for that singular vocality in writing, for that indelible trace that cannot and will not unhinge itself from the acousmêtre of the author, is grounded in a notion hat the best of writing is always the most original, the most unique, the most individuated.

And yet, those moments that seem to 'speak' to me of me, those intensely reflexive turns in the written prose that speak back are precisely those things I dislike in my writing, Only when I am able to write as if  in control of the materials –  only as if unfolding an idea in full and erudite spontaneity, as if in short, I were someone else – only then do I feel that the writing is good, secure. In shot, writing is always for me a kind of effacement.

I want to purge those embarrassing Northern vowels, that mark of suburbia, of the Midlands, of bland, safe lower bourgeois, poorly educated autodidact. I want to write as if I were from a glorious and aristocratic generation of emigré Jews, of dissident Palestinians, of Hungarian violinist, of African rebels, or Cuban guerillas; of Clarissa Furtwangler, Szagylyn Passmaker, Hyacinth Smortlyna, Mahmoud Kobal, Cruella Rozhdestvinsky. Wouldn't it be great to be that, to be other than this white, bland, suburban bore?

When students begin to write critically, intelligently, creatively, perhaps the last thing we should do is encourage to write as themselves. Who on earth wants to do that? Why not encourage them to write as if.

AND YET.... In this tendency to efface ourselves is precisely located the operation of a certain power at its most unmediated, in this feigning of boredom with oneself, with the routinely quotidian white. To play act as if in turmoil with oneself, to march endlessly through the detritus of one's average life in search of something else, something new, something Other, is the act of a class terminally ensnared in luxury, in excess without telos, without suffering. It is the feigning, the colonising , the ruthless appropriation even of the pain this class inflicts as if to say – we cause you harm and yet we maintain the right to own your suffering, to colonise it with our soft and whining pettinesses.

Here then is precisely the burden: to rage against self is to play act as if powerless; and yet to valorise the care of that same self is to enact that brutality of a self-obsession in the face of  the cruelty inflicted on others.

No way out. No way out???

In that encounter with the self, as if speaking back to oneself from the written page, then, one experiences a moment of extraordinary uncanniness when the promise of some kind of way out is glimpsed if only for a moment: the self becomes performative, split, epistemologically impossible, the creepy doppelgänger that promises both a death and a rebirth.

I am you, speaking back to to you. Who do you think you are?

merry... erm.... (sigh)

sigh (rolling of eyes)

well I suppose merry something ought to be be wished, granted, raised or whatever one does with such things (shoved up santa's arse?)

I know....

merry overdraft.....

(sigh sigh sigh)

CBT? erm...

I am currently undergoing some cognitive behavioural therapy. I was referred by my employers who though I might benfit from changing my perspective on stress.

I must confess to having been (and still being) extremely sceptical about it all. As my friend Olga points out, in sound Freudian terms, the repressed will always return. I guess my anxieties about it also come from my commitment to the Lacanian moment, to the subtleties and strikingly helpful interventions Lacanian therapy can make. I suppose this is where my profound and almost pathological distrust of personality therapies comes from (especially anything to do with Jung): I have always found them hopelessly reductive about personality, as if types analysis were a good beginning to divining what makes us unhappy, unable to function as we would like to. Of course, the fact that a whole train of managerial sub-Jungian modes of testing has grown up is testament, perhaps, to the conservatism of the Jungian orientation. But, we must remember, as Lacan reminds us in Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Freud was no progressive himself.

So, my worries about CBT go something like this: the emphasis seems to be on ‘helpful’ and ‘unhelpful’ ways of thinking. This is the bit that struck me as deeply naïve on the Royal College of Psychiatrists website:

CBT can help you to change how you think ("Cognitive") and what you do ("Behaviour"). These changes can help you to feel better. Unlike some of the other talking treatments, it focuses on the "here and now" problems and difficulties. Instead of focussing on the causes of your distress or symptoms in the past, it looks for ways to improve your state of mind now.

The emphasis on the here and now, especially the terms on which it constructs that ‘here and now’ as in some sense easily recoverable, is what worries me. I’m no Derridan, but haven’t we long since learnt to question such casual notions of the nowness of now? So what might this now mean here? How does CBT attempt to construct that now and are there any similarities with other modalities of practice? What is striking is that the sessions I am taking seem to be regressing slowly from the here and now to the causal – in other words, a kind of hidden Freudianism is at work here, a secretive second text in the analysis that speaks only hesitantly, but speaks nonetheless: there is cause, meaning, hidden agency in your past that speaks now slowly but is there, makes itself felt. I feel almost as of that past is held out of sight, held in abeyance in order that I might be hurried on my way…. good little soldier...

loneliness

I am lonely.

There I said it.

But is that something I should say? Is saying it something like bringing it into being, or is saying it the start of a diagnosis, a naming that leads to fixing?

I have often wondered how to write about loneliness without soliciting intervention. In a sense it's no problem at all because real loneliness would be to write and hear no response, no come back, no authorship, nothing. And yet isn't writing just that, just this empty greyness that opens up without end – onwards and onwards it stretches like a long and hopeless dirt track never reaching, never twisting enough to make he journey anything other than an inbetween, a kind of noplace.

The emptiness of writing is there, though, is connected to something more, something quite pressing and urgent, something so large, so heavy that it feels as if it'll crush me. I am talking about my own profound loneliness, my own profound hostility to myself.

I have for some time been withdrawing, moving away from the role of the bon viveur, the host who laughs and jokes, offers food and makes merry. And I'm not sure why. Friendships are as tight and meaningful as ever, and work, although deeply frustrating, is as rewarding in its own way as ever.

What has changed, I think, is my body: I have for some time been struggling with extraordinarily low levels of energy, finding it hard to move, to sleep, to think, to concentrate on the simplest task. I am breathless, sore, tetchy and irritable. I find company difficult, and I am constantly on the edge of a mild but pervasive depression that will never quite leave, but never quite arrive.

Today I am working from home. And I can't help wonder if this has something to do with it: perhaps it is a problem that has been building for some time, but work is becoming increasingly complex and debilitating. I am haunted by a sense of radical detachment from myself and from my work (I have always been one of those who invests too much in that relationship). Colleagues are wonderful, professional and kind and always seem pleased to talk or to share or just to be around me (and I love them dearly), so why do I feel so lonely?

When I think about other lives, other people's ghastly situations, abject poverty, danger, starvation, or even deep deep unhappiness, I wonder how I dare even speak of my loneliness.

It is shameful.

And yet it is there. Some of my friends struggle with this every day of their lives – depression, illness – and I have always admired their ability to find ways of coping, find strategies for continuing to operate extraordinarily effectively.

I, on the other hand, seem singularly ill-equipped to deal with the slightest change in my body. It's as if I have become its slave. It despises me an torments me. It intervenes in ways that make even the slightest simple daily operation (chairing a meeting for example) almost impossible.

It hates me and I am lonely. The two things are one and there is no way out.

 

There I said it, but should I have?

Yet there is a kind of poetics of loneliness that I can't help being drawn to.

The poetics of despair, not the poetics of self-pity, is highly attractive to me and has drawn me to some dark and dangerous places. I love to tarry here and to touch the edge, to feel the space beyond – all empty, without light or heat or life.

It draws me to it, thrills me.

Perhaps there is something in me that takes pleasure from this despair, attaches myself to it as to the Real. It sticks into my body, stops me from assimilating effectively to the rhythm of the machine, holds me above the blandness of total symbolisation (and thus annihilation).

It might be that for me to live as one lonely is to live as one who is not a slave. Slavery to the Real might be my only place from which to rail against the machine.

At he moment, being caught here in this predicament between machine and Real, between rhythm and mass is as living.

There I said it: I enjoy my loneliness. It is my dark sibling that keeps me awake and makes me bristle and hurts me and tuns me around, but who will never allow me to slip away quietly...

I have said it, but should I have said it?

the political economy of sickness

I am sick. I have been now for several days and I do mean sick... (abdominal pain, vomitting - you get the picture)

I tell you this not for the usual blog-tick reasons (i.e. as if I wanted to share or unload or tell you all about me, me, me). That's part of it, of course – feeling sorry for oneself can be its own kind of delicious, even when it seems to be too overwhelming to get out of bed in the morning. No, the main purpose of my writing here and now is to try to make sense of something I've hinted at before and something that is beginning to really dig in for me – the cultural work of infirmity, or, perhaps more precisely, the political economy of sickness.

This week was going to be a crunch week – several crucial meetings with university managers about strategic matters, and a crucial meeting with colleagues about other crucial matters and so on. What has amazed me (and I say this not from some kind of unrelenting egotism, but rather from a position of genuine surprise) is that I am not indispensable and that, after all, the world continue to rotate and my not being at those meetings has not bought the universe crashing down around my ears.

Part of me of course is dismayed - what do you mean, you can all continue to function without me? I cherish being needed in ways that are bordering on the pathological. This is bad (very bad), but I can't help it. Perhaps it's about the joy of seeing another alleviated when you can help, or perhaps its really to do with my own ego (in both the informal and Freudian senses if the term).

Another part of me is intrigued by some of the ways in which the relations of production can absorb and  make room for sickness, even integrate it, account for it, make explicit provision for it whilst also nonetheless marking it out as stigma, sign, semiosis in excess.

What is particularly intriguing here, it seems to me is that, if my hypothesis that capitalism incubates a situation in which, for example, fat bodies are becoming increasingly transgressive, then why this extraordinary attempt to absorb sickness, to accommodate to it? Bodies are commodities, producers of labour hours, site of productive force; they situate for of the political economy of health that drives medicine; they are the material foundation of most cultural production. So.... why this accommodation?

I have colleagues and friends who suffer untold indignity and pain at the hands of their life-threatening illnesses. They bring to that suffering not just a simple stoicism (to call it that is to reduce it to the most banal and pointlessly comforting narrative), but a rage against it. They hate being sick; it makes them crazy; it impacts profoundly on their lives and their 'excess' lies far beyond what I am trying to articulate here. What is striking about their story is the extent to which they are not easily assimilable to a single narrative. Their excess, their sickness, is not reducible to mere plurality or ambivalence, but to an impenetrable and inassimilable whole, a unit so in and for itself as to refuse naming, refuse articulation, symbolisation. In that sense, its is an excess that threatens

Has the excess in sickness 'itself' been co-opted to the rhythm of the machine? Has infirmity become a kind of economy to itself?

There is something in Marx's theory of commodity fetish to help us here (but only as a starting point): capitalism fetishes and thereby freezes, paralyses what it cannot fully assimilate: excess, what falls beyond the body and cannot be transformed into surplus, is thus something in late capitalism that must be attended to. The excess (and for our purposes, lack and excess, over-abundance and paucity are structurally equivalent) is something which must in some sense be spiritualised, or, at least, enchanted. In this sense, the political economy of sickness is thus the political economy of one instance of aura, of the magic of the thing.

To be sick is thus in some sense to be hallowed: I have been struck at how many of my colleagues have been kind (they are always kind and they are good and decent people but the tone of that kindness is as in some sense hushed, respectful, conceding a space and place to me that is not there when I am well).

The political economy of sickness is thus Gothic in a very meaningful sense – with sickness comes the externalisation of anxieties about mortality, contagion, and the grim materiality of bodies, and a charging of those bodies with the sacrament of suffering, so central to he Judao-Christian tradition, and at the heart of the capitalist poetics of sickness. In hat poetics, suffering, which is invariably both an impediment to but also caused by capitalist production, must be taken out of the economy, magicked away to a place where the perverse hagiography of suffering can unfold itself without calling the general political economy into question. As in Gothic fiction, the capitalist poetics of sickness are thus a secretion of a simple exchange value, performatively reproduced back to us as if it were in some sense holy.

Blessed are the poor and sick for they shall inherit the world.

 

would that....

would that I were an other, another, someone susceptible to this gaze I turn here and there, over and over, around and around through the spaces of buildings full of people raging with disenfranchisement, a sourness hat eats, picks, prickes and spikes like so many spasms, so many panics, so many knives in the belly

would that I could take us all, my colleagues and me,  to a place where the serene and calm work of care for others could unfold without impediment, and meet the day with he knowledge that this day will brighten, enliven and enlihten others

would that the other could grow there, spread and nourish itself, and that we were instrumental in its coming-to-be

would that the sound of another were the sound of joy, of wholeness, of complete self-contentment, not the chatter of one's own imagination, one's own doubt, anger, insecurity and dismal boredom at oneself

would that the sound of a knock at my door were not the sound of obligation or of another day lost to another crisis or another deadline missed, another colleague disappointed, another compromise of principle

would that the sound of the phone were not the sound of indignation, of reminders of tasks still to complete, of days filled with yet more inanity, more administering, more sprawling in the detritus of another's labour

would that community were the heart of our labour and that our labour were not so beholden to, complict with, instrumental in, susceptible to the rhythm of the machine, the petty indignities of acquiescence, co-opting, complying, making ourselves all fit to the template, the model, that image, the thing that haunts us.... that which they want

would that the days were brighter, that the air were sharper and the space in my head for thought were  less cluttered, more serene, more calm

would that the table I sit at were less oppressive, less demanding, less of a reproach

would that the world were not so small, that space were bigger, time were slower amd the inexorable decline into infirmity and the indignity of a body breaking were less inevitable, less predetermined, less anticipated

would that I were someone else, somewhere else, thinking other thoughts, being other beings

But I am here and here I must stay, here I must do and be and here I will ultimately end

L and "all this".

"Where are you?", I asked, my clammy hand slowly moving across the rough table surface, my head pounding and my stomach screaming for inner calm, for a time when this was not part of my life, when this did not keep me awake and gnaw into my stomach lining.

There was no reply. I could hear him breathing, here the anger in his silence, but there was nothing more. He did not hang up, but nor did he speak.

"Hello?" I said again.

He sighed in irritation, and I imagined his eyes rolling, impatient at my attempt at reconciliation.

I tried to stay calm, tried to regulate my breathing, but his implacable indignation fired me up with shame, self-loathing, a reshaping of myself, a reworking, a recasting that turned a happy and easy place, an easy being, upside down, inside out. It will never be the same again, I said to myself, my heart beating very loudly.

My confusion, wrapped in shame and a genuine hurt, seemed to want to tighten its grip, a grip I had known before – the smell of fear, the reddening of the face, the heat under the collar – as if found out, as if exposed and yet without any real clear meaning, no judgement, no due process, no Prozeß.

“Can you tell me what I’ve done, at least?”, I asked.

There was another silence. He continued to breath, that slow, sad and raspy breathing that marked his very being out from all others – his was a demeanour of weariness, slow and sullen, tinged with  a kind of  steely indifference that would often manifest itself in a slow fixing of the gaze on me, as if suddenly noticing a new prey.

“You know what you’ve done”, he said at last, that slightly thin voice, without much lower register, intensified by the telephone’s thinning. It took me by surprise. Did I know? Did he know that I was in some sense complicit in all this without even ‘knowing’ it? Does he know for me, in some way.

It will never be the same. It is lost forever, that easy banter, that warmth and that intimacy that comes only of sharing a certain kind of world, of sharing a certain time and secret things that can never be shared again.

“No” I said at last, breaking my own silence again, “I don’t know”. There I had said it. My confusion had been spoken, my genuine dislocation and disorientation that made all this so awful had at last been named.

I felt a little better.

But he soon reclaimed the silence. There was more breathing, more rasping.

B. had already told him he couldn’t drink in his house. This is why, I know for a fact, he called me again. He would never take any responsibility for all this since to do so would be to lose his iron grip on my need to be liked.

I am a place to sleep. I do not register in his world as anything other than someone he once knew.

Without drink I know he must have panicked.

He must have decided to stomach the next few months with me because drink was allowed in my house.

“I’m sorry about all this”, he said at last, carefully moderating his voice. At the time I felt  a huge sense of relief.

But now I know that it was an act of extraordinary cruelty and unbridled cynicism.

For a further 2 months he haunted my house, like a giant cadaver that would not rest, and then he left me, suddenly, never to contact me ever again.

It was a lost summer, a summer of indignity and restlessness. I am still angry at him for that.

Cruelty, spelt with an L.

I have heard since that he was unwell.

I do not care.

I learnt that from him.

He is gone and I am grateful.