framed

doctor or priest, sin
or sickness — choose your poison
there is no escape

The starting point for this was the thought ‘broken/whole’. It’s a favourite metaphor in the psychotherapy world, and it somehow suggests a relationship both with the ‘evil/good’ of the priest and the ‘sick/well’ of the doctor. They’re three different ways of framing the human predicament. Specifically, I was thinking of my own adolescence and how screwed up/damaged/broken I was, or am, by pornography — following a dream in which I was enjoying, not so much a pornographic magazine, as a pornographic newspaper. Morality and pathology. Both equally severe and both equally necessary. And it becomes difficult, with both of them, to distinguish the damaging effects of the original problem from the damaging effects of the way that problem tends to be framed by the professional doctor or priest. But what is this ‘Third Way’ which psychotherapy tries to fulfil? Why does psychotherapy carry so little clout in society, compared with the venerable institutions of medicine and the church? Is it any less damaging than the other two in any case?

Common Prayer

We are not worthy
so much as to gather up
the crumbs — the British
Empire chants in a soft voice
— self-abasing, arrogant

Again, just the tiniest fragment of a dream image, and had to be quite severe with myself to hang onto the notion that even the tiniest fragment is meaningful. I was directing a jet of water towards a collection of crumbs in order to sweep them away. In the background, I was also aware of the American poet Michael Donaghy who taught a class I attended for a year 2001-02. In the dream (and in reality) I wished I could have him as a personal friend: I loved him very much as a teacher and as a poet (he’s dead now). Last night I saw the film Interstellar and quite enjoyed it. This morning’s poem is a reflection on British and U.S. imperialism, whose roots go back to Elizabethan England — and how my own Protestant upbringing implicates me in all those poisonous assumptions on which Hollywood culture seems to rest (around the essential nobility of our entire 21st century civilisation) and which were very much in evidence in the film. The italics are a quote from the Prayer of Humble Access, which always used to affect me quite deeply when I found myself saying it as part of the Communion Service as a child:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

faithful

I’d define the soul
as that part of a man which
receives and preserves
the twisted imprint of his
whole life’s wealth of hidden pain

This isn’t up to much. Ironically however it has a lot of my character in it. There is no connection at all with last night’s dreams. While I was searching for a starting point for a poem, I was overtaken by a sense of how utterly absurd it is that we (or I) carry around from day to day so much unprocessed pain from the past. Where does all that pain that we went through (or that I went through) as young people go to? What did it mean? How can it fail to shape the present still, even if only as an echo of the past? I suppose in fact there is a connection with the dream. I dreamed an efficient young mother was teaching me how to ‘read’ football scores — as in, can you tell, from a score such as ‘2-1’, whether it was the home team or the away team that won? This inevitably threw up a memory for me of my teenage years when I was bullied and misled, spiritually, by my guru into performing ceremonial magic (arguably black magic) to attract a win for him on the football pools. It’s the only time I’ve ever taken an interest in football scores. The pain associated with this memory must count as fairly trivial when measured against all the different kinds of possible trauma that there are. But it’s still mine, and it’s still too great to process properly, ever. Faithful is meant to suggest the idea of a faithful record or a faithful imprint. But also Christianity. Paradoxically it was my Christianity which rendered me so vulnerable to a belief in magic. Catholic monks pray every mealtime for the souls of the faithful departed. I always wanted to protest what about all the other souls?

miracle

call my name — witness
the divine machinery
of recognition

This poem cost a lot of effort. Remembered very little of my dreams this morning. I was among several women all of whom were wearing ape-costumes without the head of the costume: so their own heads were visible. I thought I remembered the name of one of them, unsure if I would make a fool of myself by guessing it out loud. The chain of associations this dream gave rise to, awake, included: King Kong; cybermen; Prof Brian Cox’s TV series ‘The Human Universe’; the name Penny; John Wilmot Earl of Rochester; my own poem layering from last week; the novelist and poet Charles Williams. I see quite a lot of Charles Williams in this morning’s poem, with its juxtaposition of the everyday with a slightly pompous abstract theology. I am learning a lot about Williams from Carpenter’s book on the Inklings (e.g. a contemporary description of his face as ‘simian’) and finding it difficult to arrive at a balanced appraisal of the man. One thing is certain however: I was heavily influenced by him at an early age because my mother read me his novels when I was still a child. I believe my sanity was definitely compromised. Professor Brian Cox entitled the first of the Human Universe programmes ‘From Apeman to Spaceman’ and it occurred to me that both ape costume and space suit look roughly similar, especially with helmet missing (diving costume too). I tried a poem about human beings looking for a human identity bridging ape and spaceman. But I’m pleased the final poem is less abstract than that, and shows signs of the impact of meeting my baby nephew at the beginning of the week. It’s a cliche that babies are miraculous, but they really are.

pursuit

the stone floor contains
a well — open it up, quick!
maybe by swimming
the aquifer, I can still
escape before They get here

Diving into a hole in the ground filled with water is a classic symbol of some kind of Jungian journey into the unconscious. In the dream, swimming the aquifer is not in fact a viable option. When the lid is lifted on the well, it turns out to be dry, and there are noises coming from it as though the Enemy had got there before me. I watched five minutes of a disturbing video yesterday http://youtu.be/enGDybvVpuM which may have influenced my dream. The video imagines all kinds of dangers lurking in the unconscious, such as alien predators. I’m disinclined to believe in alien predators, but the dream suggests maybe some kind of grain of truth in the notion — if not of alien predators, at least of dangers lurking in the unconscious. I would like to know what part of my waking life (apart from the video) this dream relates to. Am I, in waking life, choosing some kind of escape which only leads into more danger? Should I perhaps turn and face the danger? Worth bearing in mind, though I can’t at present see exactly where this lesson needs applying.

bonding

I’ll never forget
— as a boy, the disbelief —
learning that Elgar’s
Nimrod is dedicated
to, and inspired by, a man

Disbelief is a revealing emotion: it reveals the subject of the feeling rather than the object of it. But I can still feel that utter disbelief. ‘Does not compute.’ Such incredibly tender and passionate feelings sweeping over me when I would listen to Nimrod, which I loved, for me indicated, even at whatever early age that would have been (roughly 9-12), that this was an intimation of sexual love. That meant girls — women — the opposite sex. How could it be that a man could have feelings of this nature for another man? Ironically I was to discover the answer to that question in my own life only a couple of years later. But it remains a mystery how Elgar himself was able to channel so much eroticism into a piece of music dedicated to and inspired by a purely platonic friendship. Two words erotic and platonic thoroughly Greek in origin. Eros and Plato. Both male. In my dream, I was involved in some kind of platonic relationship with gay composer Benjamin Britten, where I felt he needed my tenderness and support and empathy, and I was able to provide it. I am reading Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Inklings at the moment, and he makes a very good point about C.S.Lewis’s suppression of his own homosexual feelings. Lewis invested a very great deal indeed into his male friendships, but his attitude to homosexuality was that of a dinosaur.

limited

how deep does it go —
any of it? — a fine thing,
to come in the end
fully to terms with my own
superficiality

What kind of trap are we caught in, where self-knowledge always seems to consist in knowing less and less? Try telling that to my infinitely curious baby nephew, whom I met for the first time yesterday. He’s aged six months, which says something about how distant I am from his mother (my half-sister): although, I discovered yesterday that babies have a way of absorbing you into their sphere. They are pure intimacy. My poem has a lot to do with a lecture by Chogyam Trungpa, which I used to have on tape, where he explains how, in a state of meditation, the emptiness at the centre of consciousness makes the periphery extremely vivid. Baby consciousness seems to be a bit like that. From what anyone can tell. Depth and superficiality are imaginary categories of course, transcended by the fact of reality. In my dream last night, I was contemplating jumping off the side of a ship. The depth of the water wasn’t on my mind so much as the danger of getting entangled in the propellor. But the main thrust of the dream consisted in a realisation that the ship needed me to stay alive. It needed me to remain within its hierarchical structures, under the command of the captain, and somehow this was my destiny, although only an instant earlier it had seemed to me that my destiny needed me to jump overboard. If my sense of destiny is at the beck and call of a hierarchical structure, doesn’t that make it (the sense of destiny), and therefore me, in the end paper-thin and superficial? That sounds derogatory, and limited is a word that can easily be used in a derogatory sense. But that’s strange considering how limited on all sides we are, in so many ways. Some idea of a tension between infinite (sea) and limited (ship), gets to the heart of what I took away from meeting Thomas yesterday and from my dream.

unrequited

between never and
always — love hangs fire — as though
waiting for someone

By the time I was thirty, I’d fallen passionately in love four times: first at the age of fifteen with a boy, then with a succession of three different girls. My relationship with the boy lasted six years, but a question hangs over whether any of the girls cared for me, or how deeply. I never doubted myself at the time (nor really, now) that they loved me, but this flies in the face of the facts, in as much as they all three rejected me as a prospective lover. This poem is about the 2nd girl, Dina Lecache, whom I met in Israel in 1983. In my dream I was talking with her grandfather. Awake, before writing the poem I spent an hour watching Simon Schama’s TV programme about Rembrandt http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mhsn1 which ends with an incredibly moving account of Rembrandt’s painting The Jewish Bride. Dina was Jewish. There are echoes in the poem, of Eros and Psyche: Psyche is condemned never to see Eros again but always to remember him. Also, ‘love hangs fire’ suggests Eros in his blinding glory; Eros portrayed as a literal fire is an important motif in my dreams going back several decades.

job description

the archetypal
Bus Driver — ferrying souls
on the 134
from Kentish Town to Camden
— fully human yet divine

During a long phone conversation with my sister last night, in the course of talking about my mother’s ageing process and reluctance to visit her GP, we touched on Jung and how Jung seems to have felt that a doctor (or the doctor-patient relationship) can function sometimes, or often, as a channel for the archetypal dimension. In my dream, I was holding up the bus by asking the driver to help me enter a code (or password?) into some software installed on the bus. I knew when I came to write the poem, that the bus driver bore some relation to the Bus Driver in C.S.Lewis’s fable The Great Divorce (where souls after death are ferried to the afterlife on a modern bus which seems to be roughly akin to Charon’s ferry in Greek myth). Reflecting both on how commonly (especially in the past) I have felt transported into some archetypal dimension by a bus ride, and also on how unlikely it is bus drivers ever think along such lines themselves — I fell to wondering if my own job ever involves me in any unwitting carrying of an archetype. Hence the wry title. My first draft of the poem was more about the word itself archetype and how people (including myself) do seem to grasp what it means, notwithstanding the impossibility of pinning that meaning down with any precision.

here

death is a journey
whose destination consists
in going nowhere

I felt convinced this poem was pretentious nonsense until I landed on the title, which does seem to lend it some semblance of coherence, an added weight and simplicity, beyond the facile toying with paradox in the poem itself. I had a couple of glasses of wine last night and woke late with a headache, my dreams impossible to remember properly. Wandering into my kitchen, I looked at the money plant on the kitchen table, and remembered I dreamed last night that it had entirely lost all its branches and was a mere stump. This was a gift from my mother when she moved about five years ago. It had been flourishing in her flat, but began dropping its leaves in mine. This summer I became so worried at its denudation that I moved it outside into the garden, where one night the foxes knocked it off the wall: so it lost several of its main branches. This seems to have been good in the long run, as it now appears to be concentrating its energies into new shoots. Despite telling myself it’s nonsense, part of me believes that when the plant dies my mother will die.