spin

what can I create?
— to match that fantastical
freedom to believe —
that gift of the madman to
himself — anything I like

Ten years ago I tried to write a memoir of my madness. It ran to 600 pages before I shelved it. But I’ve never quite given up the ambition to see myself in print. Yesterday I spent an hour or two drafting a new opening chapter for the umpteenth time. I saw clearer than ever, that madness was something I first encountered (and in some sense, actually chose) in the person of my gay lover at the age of fifteen. This translated into the image of him as a spider in last night’s dreams. He was crawling around inside my bed and I was very much afraid I had squashed him by mistake in my sleep. But no — he had survived after all. The implication, by simple algebraic equivalence — goes something like this. Call my lover X. Call madness Y. Call the spider Z. And then X = Y, X = Z, therefore Y = Z. Lover equals madness, lover equals spider, therefore spider equals madness. Back in the day when I used to read the Collected Works of C.G.Jung avidly, there was one small paragraph on the spider which drew my attention, where he interprets the symbol of the spider as a warning against madness. The quote does not appear to be on the ‘web’ (ha, ha) but it revolved around a pun, a play on the meaning of the verb ‘to spin’ in German which apparently can be used to mean ‘going mad’.

anticipation

my death — closer now
with Bowie gone — the abyss yawns
— the moment explodes

Not much to say about this. I dreamed I was about to die. Maybe not immediately, but there was some kind of powerful fate at work which had decided my life was forfeit. It was futile to resist, but I tried to put off the moment as best I could. All the time I was aware of a very powerful Chinese deity, or collection of deities, hunting me down — they would take me in the end — that much was completely certain. They were something like a cohort of Kung Fu fighters. Bowie’s death has affected me deeply. During the eighties I used to think of Bowie, Elton John and Freddie Mercury as a kind of trio who summed up my positive feelings around my own homosexuality. Bowie was the least talented musically, I always felt. But psychologically the strongest and most interesting.

towards a vision

encompassing straight
and gay — middle and working
class — female and male —
tolerance and prejudice
— distinction — amorphousness

Last month, I was labelled posh by two people in agreement, both of whom I regard as perceptive and who know me quite well. I can’t seem to get to the bottom of my own surprise. Maybe I’m missing some dimension of meaning to the word posh. I’m aware of feeling quite aloof much of the time. But it’s the aloofness of a single loner alienated from life itself and human beings in general. Are books posh? The more time goes by, the more difficult to know what is meant by ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’. This has to be a good thing. Gender blurring likewise. My dreams last night included both types of blurring. A boy band from the nineties which turned out to be a girl band. A working class young lad in a gay relationship with me: class seemed not to matter at all in our relationship because we had a magic between us. My poem has a distinctly Jungian flavour. It’s all about trying to envision the totality and inclusiveness of a consciousness able to hold polarities in tension.

I am part

mountainous terrain —
incomprehensible tongue
— deepest mystery
of the human soul — lovers
here, now — nowhere, never — look!

Difficulty getting back in my stride after writing no poem yesterday morning. But the effort this morning has paid off I think. Very pleased with this. I particularly like the title, which I struggled to find. The opposite of ‘I am part’ would be ‘I am whole’, and wholeness is supposed to be the goal of the Jungian path (to which I am pretty well committed). But ‘I am part’ suggests being ‘part of’ a greater whole. Part of a pair of lovers. Part of a mystery. Part of the human race. There was a mystical euphoria for me in writing this poem. It may be derivative, since the final line of the poem clearly recalls the euphoric last words spoken by King Lear in the play by Shakespeare. I dreamed last night of my teenage gay lover, who in fact introduced me to the wonders of King Lear, which I still love, almost more than any other single work of literature. I was cradling him against my breast in the dream, in a way that recalls my embrace of my aged mother in real life last time I said goodbye to her on Friday. She is getting old and confused and, in order to get through to her, I am getting more physically confident to embrace her than I have ever been in the past. My dream last night also included quite literally a scene in the mountains where I seemed to be in France and unable to understand the language being spoken (in real life my French is so basic as to be practically useless). I feel this poem hangs together as a poem, which is more than I usually expect. As I explain on the ‘about’ page, I write as therapy not as art.

post mortem

I chose to believe
his lies — they were beautiful
— I sacrificed my
sanity — what more precious
gift of love was possible?

This poem encapsulates whatever still remains these days of the affirmative attitude towards my teenage gay love affair which, after it had finished, throughout the eighties and nineties and noughties, I maintained quite doggedly — but which, in the last five years, has tended to fall away and fade. A much more cynical evaluation of it, and of my lover himself, has tended to get the upper hand recently. My lover’s grasp of truth and reality was always very tenuous — or to put that another way — he was a pathological liar. My dreams last night led me to reflect on this by a circuitous route: I dreamed I was revising the novels of Jane Austen for a university exam. Also, in the dream, I felt momentarily excited to discover that a woman I got on well with in my work life was in fact the owner of Waterstone’s bookshop. Books and novels and stories all led me to reflect that a storyteller is another name for a liar. Or vice versa, that my teenage lover was maybe a storyteller rather than a liar. This was my route back into recovering that charitable view of him which lately I have lost. I am proud of the final result, since this poem successfully sums up just how much one part of me still wants to celebrate that love affair.

unthinkable

petitioning to
be my lover, head tilted
seductively — he
persuades me to abandon
Liz — how is this possible?

Based on a dream I had, Christmas morning, depicting a schoolfriend whom I lost touch with in 1973. He was never my lover in reality. But in the dream I wanted to be with him rather than Liz. I even had a plan for how to let Liz know. I quite like the (for me, unusual) way this poem just describes the dream exactly as it is, and draws no conclusions or interpretations.

yang

an erect penis —
so much more than an item
of biology

Against the odds, I’ve managed a half-decent attempt to capture in words the flavour of last night’s dream. I found contemplation of the dream quite disturbing and depressing, and I began to despair of finding any kind of acceptable representation for the issues it raises. As a teenager, I had French horn lessons, because my father had been a French horn player. The French horn I learned on was his, the French horn teacher was someone he knew professionally. Then when I was 16 I moved to London and had a new teacher — a younger man with much more awareness of the latest ideas on horn technique. I had severe emotional problems and although obviously he could see that was the case, he rarely displayed anything other than suppressed impatience with the pathetic mass of insecurities which was me. But he was a good teacher who improved my playing, and we somehow found a way of working together. In my dream last night he seemed to be concentrating deliberately on sustaining an erection while he was teaching me. The penis was hanging visible. I thought I had to imitate him. At the literal level, I should make it clear this dream refers to nothing that ever took place in real life. At the symbolic level, I guess manhood (or assertiveness) was somehow the issue between us. I was a closet gay at that time. In the dream I was fascinated in a horrified way by the penis. In reality he was quite an assertive character. I used to hate his assertiveness, because he seemed so deliberately unsympathetic. But I had nothing better to offer.

self and other

he asks me to make
two coffees — where is his wife?
— how can one extra
cup of coffee raise such deep
questions about who I am?

I got very excited by the phrase ‘latent content’ back in the late eighties, early nineties, when I was reading Freud. The idea of a dream having ‘latent content’ lying hidden behind its ‘manifest content’ — seemed a beautifully accurate summation of what goes on during the effort to ‘interpret’ a dream. It no longer excites me but it still seems accurate. And I do still get a kick from the actual process of unravelling the waking thoughts which a dream seems to want me to think. In this case, I believe my dream last night in effect contained the latent thought: ‘self and other’. I arrived at this title only after writing the poem and thinking very hard about the dream. It’s actually a misquoting of the title of a book by R.D.Laing — Self and Others — which I misquoted as ‘Self and Other’ in the course of a conversation with a colleague in the pub on Wednesday night. The dream dramatises the ‘self ‘ and the ‘other’ in the shape of the two cups of coffee which, in the dream, I’m being asked to make. My teenage gay lover’s father (Doug) has figured in this blog before. In last night’s dream it was he requesting me to make him the two cups of coffee. His marriage, for me as a teenager, epitomised everything my parents’ marriage wasn’t — stable, enduring, respectful, reliable. So the absence of his wife in the dream is a big deal. Maybe by implication the dream is thrusting me into the role of being his wife myself. Him and me were the only two people in the dream, and there were two cups of coffee.

gender boundary

white underpants flecked
with blood — somebody’s severed
penis on the bed
— too late — my own sacrificed
manhood begging to be claimed

My best effort with an impossible subject. Gender reassignment was something I considered seriously for about six months in 1990 — finally letting go the idea on the basis that, as a woman, I would look ridiculous because I’m six foot two. The poem describes the dream. The blood on the underpants implies menstruation: so maybe in the dream I have become a woman in some way that goes beyond the gender reassignment available in reality. My main worry, awake, is that in the dream I felt nothing. So the literal severing of the penis seems to find a parallel in the splitting off of my feelings (dissociation). Yesterday somebody described to me his experience of witnessing, as a twelve-year-old, a variety of gruesome scenes involving dismembered limbs and massacred bodies. Oddly enough, although I might normally worry whether I’m capable of showing enough empathy in such a conversation, I felt on this occasion that my empathy had been good. Maybe the dissociation in the dream relates directly to the situation described to me — where, as a twelve-year-old, he said he had shrugged it off as best he could. For me though, the question raised by both dream and poem has to do with my teenage gay experience. Did I become feminized by it? Or was it on the contrary, an encounter with the essence of maleness? Did I sacrifice my manhood, or own it even more than before? Both at once, I expect.

existential

without God, there’s no
slightest possibility
of discovering
what I am in myself, right
now, at this given moment

I struggle again and again every morning, with finding a title for these poems. I usually end up being ironic, but without feeling confident that the irony will be transparent enough for anyone else to perceive. The word existential often seems to me like a mystification of something very simple. Likewise the whole of theology does. I dreamed last night of my teenage gay lover. In the dream, I felt in a very vivid, present way the full connotations of abuse which our particular relationship carried. He abused me psychologically: I am reasonably happy with that statement. Exploring that feeling of being abused leads into mysterious areas when the experience being explored is a dream — and where therefore the abuser is actually a symbol of some aspect of my own potential for committing, rather than suffering, abuse. God is quite an abstract rather than personal entity for me. And oddly enough I tend to believe in Him not so much as some massively powerful Being by whom I am loved, but just as a logically necessary complement to my own incompleteness. Human love must have a divine object. In other words the universe must be capable of receiving my love directly at the moment that it bubbles up in my soul. I guess I first thought of this proof for the existence of God about 25 years ago, but it probably originates much further back, in 1976, when I first came across The Cloud of Unknowing in the Penguin translation by Clifton Wolters.