Our Flying Dog

With my partner at this time, I go to an animal rescue centre and we return home having taken possession of a flying dog.  It has ginger fur and in some ways resembles a corgi, but it is also bat-like.  It has very large, furry ginger wings that make a ‘swish’ sound when it flies.  Take-offs and landings can sometimes be a bit dodgy, but up in the air it moves with grace and elegance.

It seems to take to living in our home, and although it is perfectly capable of flying out of our sight and covering considerable distances, the dog always returns to us.  In fact, usually on return, it is pleased to see us.  There is tail wagging, eye contact and a clear desire to be stroked and made a fuss of.  It has a strong healthy appetite and we feed it on a 50:50 mixture of dog and bird food – on which it thrives.

We train the dog to carry messages to family and friends.  At first we encourage it to carry the messages by mouth, but they tend to arrive somewhat chewed and saliva sodden.  So we devise a pouch which we attach to its collar, and after dealing with one or two aerodynamic issues, we find this works very well.  We send messages only to those who will treat our dog kindly, and feed it or give it treats before it makes the return journey.

Whenever it departs, bearing a message, we stand outside our house – which is high on a hillside – and watch it swish and soar away over woodland below us until it is out of sight.  Back inside our house there is a sense of absence.  We look forward to the day and hour when it will reappear, barking to announce its arrival if we are not outside awaiting it.  Often it will have brought back an answer to one of our messages.  Somehow this always seems the best way to keep in contact with our friends and family members.

In our living room we have a large cushion filled basket where our dog sleeps.  Like many a dog, it likes to circle round and round in its basket as if making some kind of considered choice, before settling to lie down and sleep.  The last thing it does before closing its eyes is to lazily open its wings, stretching them up, then relaxing them so that they drape over the sides of the basket, their tips touching the carpeted floor.

Paving Slab Earthquake

Working with and supervised by a more knowledgeable gent, I find myself modifying a stretch of paving.  We are replacing old metal drain covers with more decorative ones.  It’s challenging labour for me, since I am not a physically strong person, but somehow the work seems to be getting done.

Temporarily alone, I notice that one of the drain covers I’m trying to lay is not a good fit, and I start shifting and re-arranging the paving slabs around it so that I can improve on this.  People are passing me by on the street while I work, and after moving slabs for a while I look up and notice that the people I am seeing are distressed.  It turns out that – unnoticed by me – there has been a small earthquake.  Apparently, the cause of this earthquake is me, moving paving slabs.  Beyond the part where I have been working, the scene looks disastrous.  Parts of the paving have collapsed completely into huge, open potholes, others totter precariously.  People are trying to keep their balance, and/or jumping and running towards more secure surfaces elsewhere.

I turn from this scene to look down at the place where I have been working.  I notice that, as in an archaeological dig, I have exposed older layers of paving from decades ago – some with thick glass slabs inserted amongst the stones, others with just tarmac.  I find this interesting, but mainly I’m feeling guilty on account of being the cause of the recent earthquake.

But at this point my supervisor and fellow worker returns.  He tells me not to worry, it’s not my fault, it’s the Council’s.  All I’ve done is to expose an underlying fault in the way the upper layer of slabs was laid, and it will be the Council’s responsibility to come and fix it.  I’m not so sure he’s right.  I feel I ought to do something about it, but I’ve no idea what and all of a sudden the idea of moving paving slabs at all seems impossibly difficult.  So I accept what he says, and we leave.

A little further on we see a group of people milling around parked cars on the roadside.  Unsure what they might be doing, I ask my worldly-wise companion.  He tells me they are checking to ensure that none of the cars are parked too closely together.

The Unidentifiable Factory Job

I have a job in a factory.  It’s something on the administrative side, possibly involving the gathering or processing of data.  It appears that I am contriving to spend time not actually doing my job.  I am managing to get away with hanging out on city streets, looking in shops, going to cafes and visiting friends of mine who are at home.  When I do go back to the factory – where men are working at big lathe-like machines – no one seems to be aware that I am skiving.  Not only that, but the truth is that I can’t actually remember what my job consists of.  When I talk to other people in the factory, especially to any other admin workers I encounter, I try surreptitiously to pick up clues about what it is that I am supposed to be doing there.  If I am directly asked about anything that I am doing, I seem to be able to get away with bluffing, using what little I do know to give an impression of someone who knows what he is doing.  I’m starting to feel increasingly guilty about this.  Everyone in the factory seems to like me and to be quite happy with whatever it is that they think I am doing.  I feel that I owe it to them to be doing my job properly.  If only I knew what it was…

Relatively Little Noir - thoughts on my work after reading M John Harrison

Invited to review it for the estimable ‘Tears in the Fence’ magazine, I have recently finished reading M. John Harrison’s collection of stories and short pieces titled: ‘You Should Come With Me Now’.  Though aware of MJH and having read some of his stories but none of his books over the years, I had mixed feelings about what I’d read.  However, you can read about those as and when the review gets published – hopefully later this year.

But it did get me thinking about some aspects of writing and why, in my own, I make certain choices and not others. 

M. John Harrison has embraced the word ‘hauntology’ to describe some aspects of his work.  I first came across this term in the early 2000s in association with arty music ventures by the bands Broadcast and The Focus Group.  It seemed to relate to their interest in 1970s visions of the future in TV drama series such as ‘The Survivors’ and the later ‘Quatermass’ productions, with musical reference to the BBC Radiophonic workshop and it productions.  The word now has a fairly sophisticated definition in Wikipedia: ‘The term refers to the situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin, represented by "the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive.".’  How you get from the first reference to the latter, I leave with you – but Harrison I think is talking about the latter.  Many of his stories play on a sense of liminal presence that is never quite clearly defined.

The ones I felt were most successful were not easy or comfortable reading.  Nor I suppose are conventional horror stories, but they tend to be a form of entertainment on the whole - the cerebral equivalent of a roller coaster ride, you might say.  The stories that affected me in Harrison’s book lacked that sense of visceral satisfaction (if that’s what you get).  Instead, I felt, they delved into all the layers of human corruption – in the broadest possible sense of the word.  Physical and mental illness, obsessive thoughts and behaviour, alienation, disjunction, etc.  They left me with a queasy feeling, which – on the positive side – disrupted my complacency, but at the same time made me uncomfortable with the very state of being human.

Clearly something of an acquired taste!  Another writer whose work frequently delves into this mire is Alan Moore, but I have the advantage of knowing Alan well enough to know that his moral compass can be trusted.  His horrors have a purpose and are often balanced by the beatific.  Harrison I can’t be so sure about – especially where his stories lose me, as a good few did.

Okay, so the question is – this is interesting material, why don’t I explore it more myself in my stories?  I don’t completely shy away from it, as there are certainly a few of the stories in ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’ which touch on this territory.  But my tendency is to add other elements, humour being a primary one.  (I should add that there is humour in Harrison’s book but it is very dark and dry.)  So my story ‘Marinating Jeff’ could conceivably be a Harrison scenario, but my choice of storytelling mode was curiously lighthearted.  Why?  I’m not sure – maybe it was the only way I could handle the material.

But the majority of the stories take in a more positive approach to human nature.  It’s not that I feel some kind of fuzzy, new-agey view of my fellow human beings – far from it.  I think we have let ourselves become well and truly fucked by corporate capitalism and by far the majority of us have our heads buried in the sand about it.  What we think of as ‘civilisation’ has proved entirely dysfunctional.  Nevertheless, on an individual level and often at a local community level, I find I can’t help liking and loving my fellow human beings.

There is a saying: ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ and I don’t doubt there is truth in it.  But without good intentions, I think we’d have arrived in hell already.  So let’s not under-value them.  I can’t put a figure on it, but I suspect that most of us try to live good lives.  Our understanding of the situation may be too poor to be in any way effective, but we try to do right by our fellow human beings and the planet on which we depend.  There’s a lot of self-delusion in this of course and I include myself amongst the deluded.  With a more enlightened system of education, and relieved from ever-insidious corporate propaganda designed to keep us consuming, we could conceivably do better.  So I don’t want to lose myself in cynicism and negativity.  I want to celebrate people, as well as explore their failings.

Looking into the dark side has its values – our perspective is skewed if we ignore it or try to hide away from it.  I’ll confront it in my writing when it seems appropriate (certainly the novel I’m working on has some very dark aspects).  But I’ll leave it as much as I can to those who probably do it better than me.

Tough job.  Someone’s got to do it.  Thank-you Alan, thank-you MJ, and also William Burroughs, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Jim Thompson, Samuel Beckett – to name but a few predecessors - for going there, finding something worth saying and bringing it to the attention of at least some of the reading world.  I’ll continue to follow my own intuitions, in somewhat more well-lit land.

                                                                    M John Harrison

Mr and Mrs Mystery

Oh Mister Mystery
I’m in your constant ministry
Open up your canister
& show me something sinister


Bring me things I can’t describe
Carvings from some tattooed tribe
Deposits from a distant star
That shouldn’t be but somehow are
And as though unmeant to linger here
Let them all one day disappear

Or stretch apart my mental range
With something cute but rather strange
That has migrated too far north
And now meanders back & forth
Treading only obscure paths
It can’t be caught in photographs

With tales of odd amnesiacs
Seers and synaesthesiacs
Folk who dress as bears & cats
Wolverines & tangle-tailed rats
Let me peer through dark partitions
At those who’ve lost all inhibitions


Oh Mrs Mystery
I need your subtle palmistry
Open up your bag of tricks
Throw miracles into the mix


Show me frogs in great profusions
Falling from blue skies
Show me statues with contusions
As tears of blood drip from their eyes
Mandala cut in wheat field scene
The name of God in an aubergine

Experiments with weird results
Which folk would rather think were lies
You’ve stuff to start the strangest cults
But I have found it no surprise
As through your secrets I still dive
Much stranger yet
            to be
                    alive

Getting Real in Bethnal Green

At the start of what was to be the heatwave summer of 1976, I was a confused 23 year old would-be hippie, wondering what to do with my life.  Intending to learn about social work, I took a voluntary post for 6 months as a ‘warden’ in a half way house for ex-psychiatric patients in Bethnal Green, East London, just round the corner from the famous Brick Lane Market.  Nicholas House, the hostel, was a substantial end-of-terrace four storey Edwardian building housing about 20 residents plus some live-in staff.  I learned a lot about psychiatric social work during those scorching months and the principle lesson was that I couldn’t hack it.  I was deeply naïve and very much steeped in the teachings of RD Laing, whose work is generally discredited now.  Laing was a radical psychotherapist, and in books such as ‘The Divided Self’ and ‘The Politics of Experience’ put forth challenging views. Psychosis, for example, was a journey within, a human response to the pressures of living in 20th century society and to intrinsic flaws that developed within families.

The appalling situation of the residents of Nicholas House and other mental illness sufferers I met in East London at that time, seemed to me to bear out Laing’s ideas.  The organisation that ran Nicholas House, then known as the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, was I’d guess a pioneer of ‘care in the community’.  This concept was taking off, as large psychiatric institutions were beginning to close down.  The PRA ran day and evening centres, lunch clubs, ‘industrial education’ sessions and even provided sheltered employment (making plastics products) for those in need of care.  A stated aim was ‘to stimulate the patient towards greater initiative and social awareness of his environment and society’.

This was laudable, of course, but the great majority of those with whom they dealt were not in any way ‘cured’ of mental illness, they were ‘stabilised’ on powerful anti-psychotic drugs.  One of my daily duties there was to hand out the tablets and ensure that they were taken.  The medication tended to make people perpetually sleepy, apathetic and withdrawn.  With a few exceptions, they were virtually impossible to ‘galvanise’ or ‘activate’ as I was frequently chided by my superiors to do.  And what did the community really have to offer them?  Getting a job was seen as desirable, but the jobs that were available (if at all) were dreary production line drudgery – hardly conducive to mental health.  Enough, I felt, to drive anyone mad.  One day I wrote in my journal: ‘Another day goes through the motions in Bethnal Green.  The residents march irresolutely to work or day centres.  Close to entropy, they follow the line of least resistance five mornings out of every seven.’

Another of my duties was to take residents for assessment sessions at a nearby psychiatric hospital, primarily with a Doctor Denham.  Austrian in origin, he spoke just as cliché psychiatrists do in comedy films in a pronounced Germanic accent, vs instead of ws, and phrases punctuated frequently with the question “Ja?”  My initial reaction to Dr Denham was one of dislike.  He was another authority figure, like my superiors in the PRA who I’d come within a few weeks to loathe.

I was not alone in this.  Most of the paid staff – although dedicated to their work - were unhappy.  There was no clear salary structure, no transparency as to how funding was being used and they felt their own ideas were not being listened to.  They were members of the NUPE, but the PRA refused to recognise the union.  Those who participated in a one day strike to protest about this were summarily dismissed the following day.  It was not good practice.  And, despite the rhetoric, I found my superiors’ attitude to the mentally ill both patronising and unrealistic.

However, after a few sessions at the hospital, I began to revise my opinion of Dr Denham.  I noticed how he recognised and treated each person he saw as an individual.  That he could do little more than prescribe medication, I felt, was more a reflection of the pressure he was under than of his preferred policy.  He could be humorous at times.  He also let slip that he too had a low opinion of my superiors at the PRA.  (Essentially I learned that their service was contracted by the NHS because it was the cheapest on offer.)

I found myself wondering what he might have to say about Dr Laing and his radical psychiatry, but there was little opportunity to ask and despite my growing respect for him, I still found him a little intimidating.  My own pro-Laingian stance was, despite all the seemingly supportive initial evidence, becoming a little shakier.  I’d been tasked, as part of my induction, to produce a sort of essay on the work of the PRA and did so, voicing my criticisms.  In an appendix (yes, an appendix, - God, I was pompous!) I’d quoted Laing.  When my piece was returned to me, a question appeared below the quotation.  “Why is Laing in private practice?”  It was, I had to admit, pertinent.

I’d become quite fond of one of the residents.  D-, a big man but always neatly dressed in suit and tie, was insightful and witty.  You could have mistaken him for a successful businessman.  You’d certainly wonder why he was in Nicholas House at all.  One day he decided to stop taking his medication.  Though I had to toe the line and try to discourage him, I secretly applauded his decision.  “Right on, D-!” I thought.  Within a few weeks he’d ceased to shave, wash or leave the hostel and was wandering about ranting aggressively and incomprehensibly.  He was sectioned.  The last I saw of him he was being virtually frog-marched into an ambulance, yelling for the police.

Confusion, as it so often does, was descending upon me.  At last, towards the end of my stint, I got a chance to ask Dr Denham about RD Laing and his views.  According to my notes made at the time, this is what he said: “People can haff too much insight, ja?  Most people go through life viss delusions about ze self -–so vhy make patients see vhat they don’t vant to see?”  And of Laing specifically he told me:  “I vass the the von who vass left to deal viss RD Laing’s failures.”

I don’t know how true this was.  But as far as I remember, neither in his books nor in a lecture he gave that I attended a year or two later, did Laing ever admit to having had any ‘failures’.  The journey within was apparently for an elite only, not for the working class in Bethnal Green.

An online trawl whilst setting up this piece for the blog reveals that Robert Mullan - whose book 'Mad to be Normal: Conversations with RD Laing' appeared in 1995 and is the closest thing to a biography - has made a film about Laing in the late 60s, due for release in April and starring David Tennant.  After writing the above piece, I re-read some of Laing's work and still found myself impressed by much of his thinking.  Maybe the book or the film might resolve some of the issues I had back in '76.  I certainly look forward to seeing the film.

Faking Fakery and Faking Awards

In my blog of November 27^th last year I ran a couple of pieces resulting from an attempt to play creatively with the concept of ‘fake news’.  Influenced by the work of poets such as Steve Spence, I was looking at what could be done by collaging ‘found text’ from various sources with or without insertions of words that occurred to me during the process.  I’d started by looking through a UK newspaper and mashing together headlines to maintain grammatical consistency whilst juxtaposing disconnected content (‘man accused in birthday suitcase struggle’, ‘sales figures play tricks 40 years on’).  I’d then attempted to similarly mash up the content of the articles from which I’d lifted parts of the headlines to create a spoof chunk of ‘news’.

In the first of these, ‘cost of living set to a hot samba rhythm’ I cut in content from Wikipedia and phrases or sentences that simply occurred to me in the process of putting it together, in the second, ‘college award is toast’, I took a more austere approach and simply collaged content from the articles on the page from which I’d lifted the headline words. 

My purpose was to see what came out of this experimentation and whether it gave any bearing or perspective on the media and particularly around the concept of ‘fake news’ itself.  I’m not sure it led to any great revelations but was aware that the second piece in particular demonstrated how convincing the language of reportage can seem, even when it is broken apart and re-assembled into nonsense.  There was something about the tone that continued to make it feel like you were reading ‘news’.  This, in itself, I found instructive.

Since then, of course, we’ve had the man who has been coining the term for all it is worth over the past year announce his ‘Fake News Awards’ in which it appears that reports (not always actual news articles) were selected by the president and his team in which there were factual inaccuracies.  It has been subsequently pointed out that in each case, those inaccuracies were duly acknowledged by those responsible; apologies and corrections were issued once the errors came to light.  The whole thing was a further step in a crude strategy of obfuscation, an ongoing attempt to undermine trust in anyone who voices an opinion critical of the regime.  Whether this will work for them in the long run, I’ve no way of telling.

The difficulty around it all is that there are often good reasons to distrust the press and media coverage of ‘news’.  The very act of transforming information about events that occur in the world into ‘stories’ implies a series of manipulations.  What is selected, what is left out, and by what criteria?  Whatever their level of integrity, the purveyors of ‘news’ have to sell their product to us in order to make a living – so this becomes a factor in its presentation.  The level of complexity in human affairs is such that we may well be incapable of perceiving a true and accurate picture of what is going on, anyway.  It’s no wonder we prefer the distraction of trivia, and therefore that’s what a large proportion of our media contains.

 

Years ago, journalist friends of mine used to joke about the ultimate UK tabloid headline – if I remember rightly it went something like: ‘Transvestite Vicar in Last Minute Mercy Dash to Rescue Palace Corgis’.  Sounds like one of my mash-ups, doesn’t it?  Maybe I should continue this line of research.

But I recognise that now I’ve made myself a part of all this.  Those of you who read this blog presumably do so because I provide some level of interest and entertainment – implying a level of shared taste.  The views I occasionally express may well coincide with yours.  Such things propel us into one of those social media type ‘bubbles’ in which we feed one another only that which we want to hear.  We cherry-pick information according to our bias.  This too brings a level of fakery into the ‘news’.  Is there any way out of the fog?

Personally I can only go back to one of the reasons I gave for writing my book ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’ – to promote the idea of mental flexibility.  Neither trust nor distrust any viewpoint completely.  If you favour a left-wing approach, don’t close your mind to what the right-wing are saying, and vice versa.  Beware of swallowing any information without cross-examining it, no matter how much it appeals to your personal bias.  Maintain humility, and a perpetual sense that there is far more that you don’t know than that you do.

It probably won’t help you win friends and influence people, mind.  I mean, look what it’s done for me.