 Broken promises I have an addiction: Last Thursday I arrived at Waterloo Station forty five minutes before my train was to leave. I had three books in my bag. Two I had already started. I was enjoying both. The third I was excited to plunge into. Three potential companions for the wait and the journey down to Portsmouth. I spotted a free seat and started towards it. The hankering stopped me. I have time, time to slip into the bookshop - not buy anything - just see what’s lying on the tables for future days. I mumbled the mantra: You will not buy a book, not one book as I skipped towards Foyles. * What’s it like to go through a life unloved: To live for eighty years, to have been a child, to have been married, had children; to have worked alongside people year after year after year; to retire to a community in the sunshine and sit with the same people night after night over a Cristal, and not once found the care, the attention, the valuing, the intimacy, that we clumsily call being loved?  Sien with a cigar, Vincent Van Gogh In a letter to Theo - his brother, his confidant and constant support - Van Gogh tries to justify and persuade his family that he is right to marry Sien, a prostitute he was living with. In it he wrote something I have never forgotten: How can she be good when she has never known good? When I think of my mother, these words come back to me and I think, how can she love when she has never known love. Didier Eribon’s rousing, pain-ridden, vital new book, The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman. which I bought that afternoon (a victim of seduction) brought images and ideas of my own mother in its wake. Eribon draws us close to the agonies of his mother's existence : her marriage to an unloving, controlling and violent man, "unhappy her whole life" as she trudges from domestic servant at fourteen, to cleaning lady, to factory to worker and ending with sliding into un syndrome glissement. (A beautiful French expression for the slipping into the arms of death through a sense of sheer hopelessness). He unpicks the ambivalence at the heart of his relationship with his mother. His yearning and education has taken him far from his family and the distance of deracination is difficult to bridge. He writes about their tempering of language in an effort to connect:  I changed my voice, my sentences, my words... of course without being able to modify everything… I spoke to her in a mix of her language and of mine, or to be more precise: a mix of her language, which had also been mine earlier in life and which I still knew, and the language that I actually speak today. Did something similar happen for her? Did she adapt her language when she was with me in order to come closer to what she imagined to be correct usage, which she didn't fully control even if sometimes she would do her utmost to talk the way they talked on television? Perhaps she did. - Didier Eribon Page after page could almost have been lifted from my own filial life, watching a mother blanked by the world and shrinking from enagement as I drifted elsewhere. The omnipresence of the televison. The battle against its prattle, where conversations are smothered and die. Whether there is any interest in what the highly flexed voices from the television are saying or not is irrelevant; the television will be on and we must search for a response against the garish bonhomie of a gameshow. Our presence leads to no pressing of the off button.  The degeneration will not be televised Is the television a comfort or the easy curtailing of thought? Distraction is the greatest defence against what we cannot bear to think about; and what we cannot bear to think about is probably what we should be thinking about. But, - and the saddest thing is how many - there are lives so raddled and ravaged by circumstance and society’s weighted indifference that the strength to think, and to think that you might matter, are shredded. The bleat of television dissolves the screams. Eribon’s work, a contending with Simone de Beauvoir’s little known yet magnificent book Old Age, ends with a cri de coeur, a positioning old age in relation to political philosophy. De Beauvoir advocates a staving off of decline, at least a slowing of cognitive decline, through attachment, an active engagement with ideas, people, activities and remaining curious. (What health hangs in curiosity). Eribon wants to broaden the view to take in where the elderly sit or lie in the ideas that forge society. There is no pioneering, provocative, demanding voice for the elderly. No transforming ideology encompasses them. They have no ‘we”. They have no future and futurist manifestos have no need of their fading hearts. Eribon demands that they need more: if they have no 'we', we must become their voice and we who become their they, must fight for their place in a society that must be shaped to care more than it does. We will, if we are unlucky to live long enough, become increasingly dependent, our lives increasingly impinged by physiacl ailments, our existence fade to invisibilty. Does it have to be? This is, after all, the fundamental political question: Who speaks? Who is able to make themselves heard? And if this fundamental political gesture remains inaccessible to so many people who figure among the most dominated, the most dispossessed, the most vulnerable, does it not fall to writers, artists, and intellectuals to speak of them and for them, to make them visibleand to "make their voices heard," to take up Simone de Beauvoir's expression again? Perhaps it is even necessary to "lend them a voice," the voice they do not have, the voice they no longer have -indeed, in the case of dependent older people, the voice they can never have again. - Didier Eribon  My mum, aged ten My mother has never had the urge or the ability to take hold of her place in the world and fashion it so that she might fit more comfortably within it. She has allowed it to shape her. She has incorporated, interiorised, the way women like her are circumscribed by society. Circumstance and the hands of men formed her: her spirit squeezed and misshapen by an indifferent mother, an absent father, a mocking husband, a lack of educational opportunity, childhood abuse, post partum depression and that constant lack of love. Untended soil bears no fruit. Now she is ill and facing death. Her body is blighted by swelling and disease and her response to it is the refrain of relinquishing which she has sung all of her life: What will be, will be. It is the defence of the impotent. I have written many poems about my mother. She has never read them, she has no interest in reading them. When I'm with her I try to draw her into a space where she might shine: her thoughts, her feelings, her laughter. She steps into this space tentatively, unsettled by its strangeness. A son's love is perhaps too late. The die cast. She will die soon and her death will mirror her life: she will die without valuing herself, without being valued. How could she have loved when she never knew love. * Although it is now part of the Waterstone’s monster, I hold a memory of Foyles when it was owned by Christina Foyle. Then, they had no idea what books they had. Once you found a book you wanted, you would take it to a little wooden booth and receive a chitty to take to another wooden booth where they would take your money and send you back with another chitty to collect the book from the first wooden booth. Often, shuttling between the booths, you would lose your way and end up at a booth where they claimed never to have seen you or the book you have come to collect. It was delightfully slow pandemonium.
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 The Word is my shepherd, Rachel Clare A little boy is in a lift. He is wearing red shorts and a soft yellow t-shirt. He stands close to his silent mother. So close he can feel the fabric of her coat without her noticing. He is a fearful child and, as they descend, each floor carries its own clutch of catastrophe. She doesn’t say much. He says even less. When the door opens and the light comes in, he doesn’t race out. His younger brother does. His younger brother charges at the world, laughing, babbling, a fearless emperor of wherever he roams. He and his mother follow. They are off to the post office to cash a cheque. The post office, also a newsagents, is squashed beneath the block next to theirs. On sunny days the overhanging balcony devours the light and you are dizzy as you enter the shop. His eyes, always watchful, adapt quickly. He knows what he wants, he doesn’t know why. Whilst his mother approaches the man behind the glass shield, whilst his brother slaps at the colourful packets hanging from a rotating display stand, he steps, head down, to where the children’s books are layered. Glimpses of what lies inside drawing him in. His small hand reaches out and plucks a book from this compendium of dreams. For a moment, his eyes follow the black marks on its cover. He cannot make out the words, he cannot make out any words. He opens the book and begins telling the story of the book. He speaks gently into the silent air of the shop. For a shy boy, this is a Herculean act but he is lost. Clipping her purse, his mother turns from the glass and approaches his performance. Without looking up, without halting the fall of words, he sees her smiling. She stops next to him, listening. Then, her hand reaches out, takes the book from his thin fingers, closes it and places it on the shelf above the one he took it from. He wants to tell her that he hasn’t finished reading the story, but, he cannot read and she is heading for home.  A boy reading, J.H. Dowd We are born into a world of stories. Stories help us hoist shape onto a world that is chaotic, unpredictable, uncertain. Stories give us a place in the world and place the world within our grasp. Each family has - if it still shares words with each other - its repertoire of stories. In the repeated telling these stories calcify. For some, they are clung to, for others they are claustrophobic. Some of us struggle to climb from the crippling family narrative. We limp from it, slowly finding a way to walk in a story in which we are a richly drawn, complex, uncategorisable characters existing in a world with others who share our full humanity. If you look out the window today, you may think what's the point: why tell stories when the maddest, loudest, selfist voices are filling the air with their howls. Or, as the writer Elif Shafak puts it in 'Writing Is a Dog's Life' and Other Thoughts: What is the purpose of fiction, really what is the point of rolling up your sleeves and labouring to craft a delicate sentence, carefully selecting the ideal synonym, or perfecting the punctuation, only to describe imagined events and invented characters when the world outside is on fire? In her playful and poignant piece Shafak refuses to rise from the retreat of her bed, refuses the role of writer because "the world has gone off its axis." In her funk, she is visited by three writers, Jalaluddin Rumi, Albert Camus and Anna Ahkmatova and bemoans how much simpler things were in their times. Perplexed, they each recite their litany of an era's suffering: From plague to purges, from famine to foreign invasion, from cesaseless violence to political malaise and personal sickness. Chastened, Shafak peels off the duvet because: no matter how bewildering and debilitating our world, we write poetry, we write prose, we write our resilience, hope, empathy, and love for pluralism, nuance and diversity, we write our shared humanity through the chaos of our times  1000, Rachel Clare I have always told stories. I spent my childhood retreating from the world and constructing stories in which I could play a more active role than the one I had in reality. And, in which the world's axis may spin in a different direction. The impulse has never left me. Inside this ageing body, I remain a child, I remain a story teller. I keep returning to the playground. Language is a playground: Digging into the mound of words and throwing or placing them together, trying to swing from one phrase to another, sliding through sentences to the whoosh of musicality is a form of absorption, engagement, of being alive. This week I reached a milestone: One thousand daily poems. Every day, since the 26th May 2022, I have written a poem that explores something - an incident, an idea, a book read, a dream, an exhibition, an emotion - from the day before. When I told a friend last week that I was about to reach the thousandth poem, they marvelled at the discipline. It isn't discipline, it's a necessary delight. It's serious play. In celebration of the milestone I have selected six poems to post below. Maybe there's something in there to delight you.  Maria or Maria Friday 10th January 2025 She has two faces one is revealed in playful guise after her demise the other is dead in her living eyes breathe voice escapes yet the shape is shot with the desire for history’s excising there are no lines in her flesh to rouse the lines she must speak her collapse is a calling to life there she is as credits roll a real character hurt and happiness in a look that flies caged there she is why was she hiding behind a broken ode to fame  Three days left Wednesday 11th December 2024 We do not notice the darkening we are crouched in to small comforts laughter, the faces of others, another pint death pulls up a chair with an offer you’ve only three days left with this fragile breath, what do you do some say heroin is a house worth visiting others want to plunge in alcohol’s pool I would want more of this this sharing of laughter, language dancing between listening hearts, and us not noticing the darkness when it comes  Life, Love & Death in Sicily Tuesday 11th February 2025 After the Letizia Battaglia exhibition at The Photographers Gallery The world does not exist in black and white yet it does shade into the mastery of drama where good, evil, innocence and a brown, is it, bag of bread, clutched close to a child’s chest as she chomps on the torn crust offers some protection from the troubles of complexity, shoot, if everything could be parcelled up and labelled, knotted string strangling the struggle beyond naming, then I wouldn’t be such a mess, thank god for Letizia and the shadows which sounds like the name of a band, she sings bloody songs framed for us to sway before chapter and verse fat feet, hard skinned, the patina of a fathered land soiling her soul, there’s no easy ascension in colour despite the martyrdom of mopping, slopping, sautéing, baking raking through a child’s hair for lice and dreams most dreams are dead, murdered in infancy, a nation of ideology got there early, placing the gun in eager boy’s hand, who doesn’t want to be like the swaggering men who have stuffed death into a sack and dropped him, weighted, in to the Tyrrhenian Sea, they are blind to the constant pop of bubbles breaking the surface  A practical madness Tuesday 17th September 2024 The morning begins with murderous thoughts I know nothing about the drosophila melanogaster only my desire for destruction of the hordes hanging on the sherry bottle, sleeping on our painted angel investigating the cool enamel of the sink, they creep from damp sponge, like most battles the scent of futility seeps into the bloodlust in last year’s staging the whip of the towel splattered hundreds against mirror and white wall before the triumphant flick brought our source of light’s shade clashing with a fragile bowl under the drunken direction of a swaggering war god, both lost their shattering a sure sign my mettle wouldn’t shape a warrior rampant zeal has been swallowed by researched stealth, patient hands glugs of wine are shared amongst the jars, sugar sprinkled with spells a drop of washing up liquid to clog their tiny black pads the vinegar fly, the pomace fly the banana fly will die their fifty day stay cut short sozzled in the red of my Rioja  When the moon darkens Sunday 30th October 2022 Madness dances next to us all sometimes in murderous dress sliding along the platform before possessed arms thrust out and push us to unguarded rails others have brothers who run naked their chakra leading the third eye a merry dance amidst the traffic & then there are those whose silent descent is witnessed behind the closed doors of intimacy where lethargy & lunacy take turns at the sticks to drum the beat or let it fall fearful screams of the paranoiac slipping into silence, rigid, catatonic until the final chaotic outburst from where no one returns frightened shrieks score the quiet & hell is let loose until the ambulance arrives & dancer is bound in a jacket, straightening them out for a drugged absence there are no jazz hands in this farewell  A sketch Friday 8th September 2022 After Ferdinand Hodler His wife waits whilst he watches her die a model lover lying in death’s slow sheeting anguish is drawn in to the bed’s penciled grid as looking is dried into detailed drawing twenty times he renders her to stiff paper little flesh left, thin legs end in the heft of patent leather shoes, rosary beads snake the clenched hands that hold her weightless frame from flying to a final disappearing, tears cannot come, they will smudge the artist’s eye  Buster builds a shelf Andrew Huberman is in my kitchen. His voice, thick with certainty, booms from a body he has spent time building. Huberman, an American neuroscientist, is a how to kind of guy. You know the type: thinking about people in the same way you think about putting up a shelf. Drill a few holes, screw in some battening, lay down your wood and, hey presto, you have a beautiful borderline personality shelf or an easily manufactured mahogany narcissist. He is talking to Bill Eddy, a man of gentler mien, before the blade of conviction cuts through. Having mounted the pulpit from the gleaming steps of data, he recites the percentages for paranoiacs and histrionics who are out there in this dangerous ol’ word these guys are gonna tame. A friend had sent me the Huberman Lab podcast on How to Deal with High Conflict People. Not, I think, or hope, because she thought I was one, but that I would find it interesting. I did. Not, perhaps, for the reasons she imagined. This laboratory, like most in science and selling, is in the business of exploration only as a path to the solid house of solutions. Proofs or predictions to trim the world. I lasted thirty two minutes and five seconds. The two and a half hour podcast, like the world it inhabits, is broken into manageable bite size chunks that can be labelled, packaged, consumed. At 38:54 you can chew up Negative Advocates; at 1:37:27 you can spit out a Combative High-Conflict Individual and the gobs of Blame. After, both men have painted the past in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer technicolour, they tell all of their listeners, children be warned, how the world has gone Bergman black and you must never get engaged, or marry, until you have known the person for 365 days. Huberman then does a snake oil routine for one of his sponsors who produce the only vitamin he ever lets into his temple. I snapped. The shrinking of complexity coupled with the brazen selling of a better self, had me broken. I was about to hurl the speaker into the oven with my Friday night fish, when I thought What Reason Could I Give. Not to the destruction of certainty or the certainty of destruction for the speaker, but the beautiful Don Cherry duet with Bobo Stenson. I usually cook with musical accompaniment and Huberman had remninded me why. Music rescued me from the madness. I switched from the attempt to straitjacket the world into explanation, to swaying in my kitchen not knowing where I was. If you don't know the track, give it a listen, it might take you somewhere.  The Crossing II (Famine Horse), Ken Currie, 2024 Artists work in their own laboratories, but - unless it is within the technical, material or formal elements of a medium - they are not in search of certainty. Certainty chokes. For artists, - and some clinicians: Oliver Sachs, for example, who once said, I would have to know someone's whole biography before I offer a diagnosis - there are no answers, only explorations, questions, playing. A path to who knows where. This is why art - poetry, music, painting - is such rich terrain and the threat that it faces from the explainers and quantifiers needs to be resisted. We must not let the rationalising mind erode art's "tendency to celebrate the purposeful purposelessness." as Jed Perl wrote in The New Republic, back in 2014:
Artist, Ken Currie, one of the so called "New Glasgow Boys", has just exhibited his latest paintings, The Crossing at Flowers Gallery, London. These are pictures of terrible beauty. There is not much light but there is life. And one of the joys at being at a smaller gallery is there is no text on the wall. You have to look, take time to engage, think, feel and travel across, and into, the canvas. All of the paintings, tender and unbearable, are exquisitely painted, full of rich detail and a fine application of paint. Currie has turned his brush to create a world that is hard, unforgiving, absurd, fascinating, ambiguous and unsettling. Having stood before them once, I went back for a second looking and wrote this: The Crossing I return to Ken’s tenebrous turning of paint to relentless gloom where white hope is dead, haunting the basement with its filleted light stiff legs and arms lift from boat’s stillness in prayer or naked despair, watched over by stern executioners, eyes resting above penitent dresses, suits stitched with night’s thread I tread through his world, keen dread presses my gaze into the blackness a murk made in mans’ mastery where I must look but never live  Ghost cod, Ken Currie, 2023 Ghost cod, an almost two and a half meter high canvas, illuminated the basement, its glow, pulling your eyes towards it. This butterflied cod is luminous. You know and don't know what it is a painting of. The lines and light of its caudal fin are intricately rendered. Currie’s use of white captures the solidity and fragility of its flesh, dense patches of colour against lighter strokes and featherings of white fluttering into the darkness. Yet, even what first appears to be a mass of greyish black is dusted and scraped to reveal a pulsing lightness. It is fish, angel, light, it is plummeting and hovering, it trembles and stands solid. It is a wonderful painting without meaning. Unless, of course, it finds its way on to the slab in the Huberman Lab. Then you'll know it's a manic depressive angel trying to escape heaven disguised as a fish. Some people yearn for explanation, I want to hold on to wonder. But, what reason could I give...
I do not claim ownership or rights to any images posted unless stated. If you hold rights to an image that I have used and wish me to change credit ordelete the image, please contact me and I will do so immediately.  When he was dying, my dad brought himself to the threshold of an apology. You were different, he said, I treated you the same as the others (my sister and brother) but you were different. My ill-fitting shape was formed early and I lugged it around the family home weeping into my duffel coat. I was a mummy’s boy but mummy, or mum as we called them, had disappeared behind the veil of valium. I had to find other entertainments or at least some sense of belonging. It took a while. I cried my way through infancy, primary school and seven different shades of duffel coats. I wiped my nose on my grammar school blazer sleeve whilst my peers pulled out their silks and petted their noses. Safe to say, I didn’t belong at home where laughter bordered on ridicule, or at school, where the teacher’s ridicule bordered on a cruel cackling intended to make boys like me shrink back to the council estate where they imagined I belonged. Childhood is the foundry of the soul. Growing up is learning how to hold, carry, comfort, protect that soul.  When I was eighteen I allowed myself to fall in love and, in that love, find some sense of belonging. There had been overtures before but, because of my background, I believed that it wasn’t for me. Headsunk into my shoulders, I was idling along Long Acre in Convent Garden, aching with expectation and fear. I had failed at school and I was making a good stab at failing at life. Something drew me from the street and I stumbled into Hatchards - once one of the oldest booksellers in England, now owned by Waterstones which is owned by Elliot Investment hedge funders - and picked up a book. I had never heard of the author, nor the title - though I think that was the draw : The Vivisector. I didn’t even know what it meant but I felt a strange thrill. I bought the book, went home and started reading. And that was it. Keats had tickled this passion at thirteen but I locked it up, feeling I wasn’t worthy. I was a dullard and literature was for those I’d been to school with, not those that I lived with. I was taken. I remain took. This week I returned to Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970), a re-reading of a book that brought me to my own threshold of belonging. Forty odd years later, along with an unexpected memory of episodes unfolding when a character’s name is introduced, traces of the thrill remain. Back then, I read everything White wrote, revelling in the worlds built with words and in the brutal longing of his misfit protagonists. The Vivisector is a barbarous and brilliant book.  Les Maisons (1921 ) Chaim Soutine I came back to Hurtle Duffield, White’s artist protagonist, after finishing another story of an artist battling against the conservative mores of religion and society. Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev (1972) is a much more sedate, less raw telling of that tension. The fronts on which this war is waged are the family and the traditions of Judaism: a father’s dismay that his son should devote himself to such foolishness as art and how the artist's image making is unacceptable within a Hassidic household. Potok creates poignant family scenes - a father's familail love poured into the Z'miros (Shabbat Table Songs), a child watching his mother's collapse and depressed retreat from the world - which make the inevitable implosion much more disquieting. It is a tender rendition of the torment.  Torment and how we treat it are at the heart of Kay Redfield Jamison's latest book, Fires in the Dark (2023). Exquisitely written, sensitive to the shredding of the mind and full of hope, it is an exploration of how we heal and what lives in the hands of those that heal us. Jamison is a compassionate companion who writes about the history of suffering: her own, soldiers, artists and poets and how it has been tended from Imhotep in Ancient Egypt to the analyst's room today. The sea encourages my melancholy And then helps me forget it Wishful Thinking, Douglas Dunn Much of the hope comes in the tending. As wars grind on around us, the book is also a stark reminder of the senseless devastation human's inflict on one another. There are descriptions from nurses at the front of the first world war who sit with young men, holding their hands and softening their fear as they die. There are graphic descriptions of injury before death. There are stories of unbearable agony. And then there are the healers, the nurses, the doctors, the psychotherapists. There is a celebration of the relationships formed in that healing process. There is a fascinating and inspiring portrait of the relationship between the suffering poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and the doctor, W.H.R. Rivers, who tended him:  Rivers believed, one must encourage patients to engage memory. First, to remember what they had pressed out of consciousness. Then, to recollect the unbearble in a more circumspect way; to grapple with the dark forces to obtain mastery over them. To be a healer was to make a patient's "intolerable memories tolerable". It was the doctor's charge, Rivers said, to "use the controlled reflection of horror to understand what the patient has been through, to allow him to meet the horror in his own strength." In the grip of suffering the patient needed to be helped to understand the situation in all its complexity. The doctor should accompany and be as convoy in dangerous waters. Kay Redfield Jamison, Fires in the Dark What else heals? Art? Nature? Love? Reading?
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