instinct

selflessness occurs
in the animal kingdom
— yet for a man, such
raw simplicity never
works out quite so straightforward

As when I once saw a mother duck launch herself directly into the face of a dog. Last night I dreamed I was trying to protect Liz from the shock wave and radiation of a nuclear bomb. Hopeless futile gesture. Not unlike the mother duck’s in fact. And of course, awake, I have Freud to contend with, who might argue that the dream expresses a death wish against Liz and not simply a desire to save her.

objects

respective fathers —
he hated mine, I worshipped
his — why did we need
a metaphor for gay sex
we were already having?

Missing from the poem is any sense of the intensity of loathing between my teenage gay lover and my father. It also misses the positive ‘feel’ of last night’s dream in respect of my relationship with my lover’s father (Doug). In real life, I thought the world of this man because he seemed so strong and gentle (unlike my own father who seemed weak and angry). But somehow we always kept each other at a distance: he was a car mechanic with very poor literacy, while I was silent, intellectually precocious, and perhaps a typical case of Asperger’s, unable ever to relax with people. I was also guilty that I was having a closet gay relationship with his son, unsure whether a guessing game was going on, in terms of whether he guessed I was his son’s lover. In the dream, he was an old man close to death. And I was able freely to express my love for him by trying to reassure him with a hug. In psychoanalysis, the word object has a particular meaning which I don’t fully understand. My impression though, is that part of it involves noticing how we ‘split’ our perceptions of people into extremes of good and bad. Such a split is apparent in the markedly contrasting attitudes held by my lover and I, towards each other’s fathers. Mostly, I am drawn to object relations theory and tend to believe it’s probably accurate as far as it goes. But I also distrust so much hard intellect, and this stops me making the effort to exercise my brain and do the reading in order to get fully to grips with the theory.

self-recognition

begging does something
to a man — so many kinds
of desperation
in this world and none of them
mine, none of them ever mine

Hardly a week goes by in London without my having to encounter someone named John Wetherell begging on the street. I can’t give him money every time. Financially I could (so long as I gave small amounts). But I owe it to capitalism to play by the rules. Appropriate hardheartedness must be worn. Funny how I talk sometimes about grieving the person I used to be. But when I encounter him on the street, each time I somehow manage to avoid recognising myself. Even if I do give him money, emotionally I ignore this reminder of the person I used to be. Last night I dreamed I was approached in Hampstead by Howard Jacobson begging for spare change. I was just at that moment doing a google search on my iPhone for the line of poetry ‘Go catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root’ which in the dream I felt convinced was John Keats (in fact it’s John Donne). In my previous life of homelessness in the early nineties, it was only very rarely indeed that I begged for money. Often for food though, or for the first line of a poem. I hated selling the Big Issue almost as much as begging for money. And always fell back upon rummaging in black bin liners outside restaurants for leftovers.

vanity

I want to be thought
cultured and intelligent
— there’s a myth to be
lived up to — stories I’ve told
myself again and again

The sense of inhabiting a fiction. The sense of utter inauthenticity. In my dream I was on the Thames Embankment talking hot air, trying to be witty in a contemptuous way, about nuns. The supposed joke revolved around some stereotype which I couldn’t even reproduce faithfully — the notion that nuns all drive a certain type of car, but I couldn’t remember the name of the type of car they were supposed to drive. Clearly relates to a conversation yesterday, about how Bob Geldof’s appeal for Africa is actually demeaning for the whole continent and only serves to reinforce stereotypes of Africa as needy and begging for charity. I suppose the dream (and the poem) asks who is the victim of a stereotype here? In my life, I stereotype myself as ‘cultured and intelligent’. In my dream, I’m stereotyping nuns in a very uncultured and unintelligent way. Vanity refers to the Book of Ecclesiastes (as in Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.). I’ve never read the Bible much. But when I spent my first night in Jerusalem in 1983, I found a Bible in my room and opened it by chance at Ecclesiastes. Stunning force of poetry.

bravado

a strange feeling of
hopelessness overwhelms me
this morning, as though
my own inadequacy
were some desperate secret

Very much wishing again that I could break free and just write poetry from the heart, instead of remaining constrained by the forms of tanka and haiku. And my poem too, is an expression of the wish to break free (from my own pretence of bravado). I did at least break free, in the poem, from my dream images, concentrating instead on how it felt in the moment. Pleasingly, I realise now that ‘bravado’ might well describe some important aspects of my maternal grandfather’s character, whom I dreamed of last night. He was conducting Brahms’ 2nd Symphony. In real life he was a music teacher and did some amateur conducting. He must have felt quite intimidated by my father’s being a professional conductor. My father’s professionalism nearly inspired a whole different poem this morning. It’s an admirable thing (as any professionalism is). But if I’m to understand my own feelings concerning it, my maternal grandfather is a crucial part of the equation. The two men are almost like caricatures of weakness and strength respectively, at some level of my imagination, if I look back with my child’s eyes. I wish I could go back and change that. Improve the relationship between those two aspects of myself, by improving the relationship between the two men in the real world.

Ewig-Weibliche

so why do women
get put on a pedestal
by men? — it’s as though
we want to elevate them
away from their own Being

And incidentally, away from ours — away anywhere — just away. I’m afraid this poem is itself something of a defence/barrier against the unsavoury content of last night’s dream. The great love of my life, at least through my teens and twenties, was a girl named Anna with whom I never had any degree of physical intimacy at all. But in my dream last night she was focused, to the exclusion of all else, upon achieving physical intimacy with me. It felt very undignified, even in the dream: so it’s perfectly clear the dream is bringing her down off a pedestal. The poem tries to do the same thing but I’ve noticed a circularity in the way the capitalization of my final word Being somehow restores her to her pedestal even though the sense of the poem is arguing completely against this tendency. Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan (the last two lines of Goethe’s Faust) is normally translated ‘The Eternal Feminine draws us upward’. But, via Google, I’ve found ‘Woman Eternal, draw us on high’ which seems better to me. Anyhow, either way, the fact Goethe chose to end Faust this way helps convey how deep-seated the whole pedestal thing is, in the male psyche.

мир

Russia — the soil speaks
for itself, and the word мир
embraces the world

In Russian, мир means both peace and world. I dreamed last night of a concert pianist named Elisabeth Leonskaja. Back in 1984 for about six months I believed I was in love with her. We had met for less than ten seconds while she signed a programme after a recital. The link above is to a clip of her playing Chopin, but it was Schubert’s G flat major Impromptu I heard her play, way back then. My feelings about Russia are a bit involved. Through the eighties, I felt that, in the Cold War, Russia had right on its side possibly through nothing more complicated than the fact that it possessed the largest land mass in the world, and so in that sense had some sort of justifiable claim actually to *be* the world (if any country had that claim). I also saw Russia as the original home of fairies and folk culture, leading back somehow into the mists of time where some kind of unproven matriarchy would have held sway. And that fed into the land mass theory, because the size of the Russian land mass was equivalent in my mind to a planetary Earth Goddess. These days if I believe in anything like that at all, it tends to centre more upon the Gaia theory of James Lovelock.

Cambridge

to understand sex
would be to understand life
— but please — with heart and
soul — an understanding which
binds rather than separates

So the high value (ultimate, even) placed by Buddha upon non-attachment is counterintuitive, and questionable after all? Is the rational intellect a help or a hindrance – both in general and in the particular realm of sex? This issue arose in the course of my blog post two days ago (last sentence of the commentary) and I seem to be revisiting it again here. Cambridge is my symbol of the intellect. I spent 3 years at the university, but my intellectual growth was severely stunted by my emotional problems, and I never really engaged with any of the people or communities around me. Soon after leaving, I started puzzling about the words intellect and intellectual. I noticed that whereas intellect (particularly in a Buddhist context) suggests something pristine, positive and full of clarity, intellectual suggests an outlook somehow muddied (in what to my mind is a shameful way) by too many thoughts.

Yesterday I contributed a post elsewhere, on an online forum, on the subject of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen (which I blogged about here last week some time). I remember vividly a conversation in Peterhouse College Bar with a fellow student who explained to me the basics of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Cambridge did have an impact; the intellectual ferment didn’t pass me by quite utterly. Another similar moment was when I got into conversation late one evening in the street on the way home back to my college, with a young intellectual (I never saw him again) who enthused as only young people can, about a new talent who was going to be the biggest thing in music very soon — by the name of Bruce Springsteen. Ten years later in 1985 I finally forced myself to find out what all the fuss was about, and to my surprise (which has never quite left me) found myself utterly bowled over. So Cambridge gave me Springsteen and Heisenberg. Heart and soul in the poem above is a quote from a Springsteen song called Drive All Night. In my dream last night, I was observing the genitalia of a girl from behind as she bends down.

disintegration

I stare goggle-eyed,
drooling, as she undresses
— how I hate myself!
words drop from my mouth — empty,
hollow, hypocritical

It might be a better poem as a haiku, axing lines four and five altogether. Except that the whole point seemed to be not so much just the fact that I was admiring a woman physically, as that I then launched into a systematic denial of my own physicality and hers. I felt compelled (in the dream) to try and assure her that she was admired for so many more reasons than just her body. Of itself that might sound perfectly fine. But I could feel the hollowness and hypocrisy of what I was saying. I suspect there’s a resonance here with Rembrandt’s depiction of the Biblical story of Susannah (I saw the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery last weekend). But mainly I think this dream relates to a conversation at work yesterday. I used the word trauma, someone asked if I meant physical trauma or the more intangible kind. I referenced Peter Levine who writes books which I believe call into question whether the distinction would be really meaningful. It’s funny how we feel as though we’re disintegrating when we experience sexual desire. But the real enemy of integration, in the dream, is my rationalising mind.

inversion

if I could believe
myself wrong that the human
race is teetering
on the brink of extinction —
what a strange world that would be!

I guess this poem speaks for itself. The title must be worth a couple of words. My world view is itself an inversion of what passes for normal, since I am completely convinced that future climate change means a world more grim than anything anyone can remotely imagine. The stuff of science fiction. But it’s an enjoyable exercise to try and imagine myself wrong about that. I could be living in an inversion of the inverted world I live in. I dreamed of mass riots and anarchy, centered upon the town of Brighton on the south coast where, in reality, there is a relatively large LGBT community and the UK’s only Green Party Member of Parliament (Caroline Lucas).