Remembrance

Tags

Globalisation, Isolationism, John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Remembrance Day, Remembrance Sunday, US Election

Remembering, forgetting and making connection

It’s been a funny sort of week, a funny sort of few months, a funny sort of year. Funny, most in terms of peculiar, unsettling, weird. Not too much of laughter really.

My reading has continued, though sometimes I’ve lacked the emotional or intellectual energy to devote to the deep and fine stuff, feeling too raw, too wrecked, too appalled and exhausted , too benumbed by what seems to be shouty, screamy, excess in the political arena, rather than the laying out of complexity which needs reflecting on. Reviewing has suffered, too, a kind of ‘what’s the point’ ennui and laissez-faire.

I was approaching the American election with dread and despair, seeing ‘populism’ on the rise, in various countries, and following its landing here, could see similar infections spreading. A pandemic of dissatisfaction being medicated by flaming invective, illusory promises and soundbites  It’s shocking that what is ‘popular politics’ seems to be retrogressive, divisive and narrow rather than the wouldn’t-it-be-wonderful-if-what-was ‘popular’ was inclusivity, connection, a recognition of our common humanity, not to mention the fact that we share our planet with other species, and just as humans need to recognise the needs of shared humanity, we need to acknowledge our interdependence on our Planet Earth, both now, and for the sake of generations which may be to come.

Isolationism, making this little country or that ‘great again’ is a dangerous illusion. We are inextricably linked, each to another.

We have become so fixed on that winners and losers, survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw view of evolution and reality. But the fittest merely means the best adapted. As a bipedal, not particularly fast, becoming hairless ape, our best adaptation proved to be with each other. We are a tribe animal, and did best by managing collectively together, not purely me versus you, but me with you. And now, we have forgotten that the ‘tribe’ is no longer little isolated pockets untouched by and untouching of each other. The tribe is all of us earth dwellers.

It’s a sobering and darkening time of year in the Northern Hemisphere. The fierce blaze of October fading and quietening, the days shortening, the energies of the natural world going inwards, consolidating, resting, dormant. A beautiful, spare, reflective season as the mask of leaves fall, and reveals the individual beauty of each tree’s core.

The eleventh of November is always a potent day anyway. It took me a long while to come to terms with ‘Remembrance Day’. In my youth, I thought on this day war was being glorified , that conflict was being celebrated. I thought we were being asked to glorify the dead ‘the glorious dead’ when there was little glorious in why they had died like this. I see it differently now. Those who have died in conflict SHOULD not have died in vain, if only we who are living can learn the lessons which their deaths have to teach us – precisely that division and conflict-between-nations will lead to more dead.

It is terrifying that the lessons of not one, but two world wars in the last hundred years (not to mention years of other smaller conflicts endlessly happening) have not been learned, and we seem to be bent on dismantling our recognition that the bellicosity of our nature needs to be tempered and restrained. The more we think ‘greatness’ is this nation against that the littler we become

I thought about those who have died through conflict, and I also thought about two poet troubadours, complex, often deeply troubled men, whose willingness to explore their own contradictions, and the contradictions of the times they lived in, produced songs that said more than simple

Remembrance day brought me to John Lennon’s Imagine, and also to his ‘God’ ( ‘I don’t believe’) We fight each other over so many ‘isms’ Simplistic though Imagine might be, Lennon’s coda,  in ‘God’ after all the ‘I don’t believes’ is ‘I just believe in me, Yoko and me’ – that’s reality’.  I thought that when it is just down to the struggle and complexity of the ‘You-and-me’ what frees us from that charged fear and hate place of ‘the other’, is the recognition of common humanity. Every day (and I am consciously having to work to notice it at the moment) there are tiny, unconscious acts of kindness and recognition between individuals. THESE people are the ‘little people, the ordinary decent people’ – not what the rabble-rousing populists are claiming as ‘ordinary, decent’

In fact, the populists are asking us to embrace everything that is UNdecent about ourselves, and claim THAT as ‘ordinary decency’

Real ‘decency’ is all around, and probably rarely found inside a whipped-up political rally. And never when what is being whipped is a hatred towards ‘other’

I do believe in the You and Me of us. Writ small, life by life, connection by connection, humankind is full of Wordsworth’s :

that best portion of a good man’s life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

That is all around, if I take the time to notice it. The splitters and those who call to our hate, our rage, our fear, make us forget unity, seeking to bind us together through division and disunity. Us and Them. You-and-Me, by contrast, might simply be We

And, of course, Remembrance Day also brought the news of the wonderfully layered, complex Leonard Cohen’s death. Like many, I’m one who has found the man, and his music and lyrics, an abiding comfort and inspiration. His willingness to own and acknowledge his demons, rather than fly from them and project them onto the other, always made him someone who ‘lived in the light’ The truly whole are those who know they are wounded and terribly broken. The damagers are those who see others as broken and view themselves as right and righteous.

One of the very wonderful gifts Cohen’s lyrics have to bring is that whatever a song is seemingly about, it has the possibility of other, wider, deeper meanings. He was far more than a simple troubadour of the layered love song. Poets, poetic vision, poetic writing not only makes us see the world in a new way, but often welds together oppositions which might seem to want to fly apart. With Cohen, the contradictions are deep and viscerally felt. Love itself is both Eros, and a trans-personal yearning for surrender to the Divine. And also a challenging to the Divine, a wrestling between Eros and Thanatos – the blaze of love and life, the loss of love and life, the ‘ring of bright hair about the bone’. Death feared, Death making meaning, Death the awareness of mortality, giving our loves their fierceness and intensity.

I’ve been listening a lot, over the past couple of days, to my Cohen collection, but also to some of the many covers of his songs. Many by people with voices of far more musicality than Cohen’s. However, for me, the particular laconic, restrained, felt, but not emoted and over-shown delivery Cohen gives us, perfectly allows the listener to experience their own visceral response, in a way that the over throbbed demonstration by others, doesn’t.

There will be no new songs, but we are gifted to be living in a world where we have the old songs, we can play them, even watch Youtube videos of live performance, and, I think, we can continue to find new meanings and resonances in his words, his music, his renditions

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William Butler Yeats – Vacillation

Tags

Poetry, Reading Ireland, Vacillation, William Butler Yeats

I

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?

II

A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis’ image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief

III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,
And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

V

Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

VI

A rivery field spread out below,
An odour of the new-mown hay
In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou
Cried, casting off the mountain snow,
`Let all things pass away.’

Wheels by milk-white asses drawn
Where Babylon or Nineveh
Rose; some conquer drew rein
And cried to battle-weary men,
`Let all things pass away.’

From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What’s the meaning of all song?
`Let all things pass away.’

VII

The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?
The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.
The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?

VIII

Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out pharaoh’s mummy. I – though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a pre-destined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.

I have had, for a time, an uneasy relationship with W.B. Yeats. He was an early (though, thankfully not lasting) casualty of academia. Yeats was an intensive and obligatory part of my degree, and the detailed dissection with literary scalpels killed the life in the poetry stone dead. Yeats and Chaucer lay side by side, dismembered. Yeats was lucky, he inhabited only a shallow grave, but my resistance to digging up Chaucer’s bones continues to this day.

I was probably one of the luckier ones: some perhaps found it impossible to approach literature with joy and excitement ever again. One permanent corpse seems like a small price

Yeats began to rise and speak again to me quite soon, and this particular poem, Vacillation, from his 1933 Collection, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, was one of the ones which brought me back to hear his complex, beautiful voice

I was going through the almost obligatory early twenties state of existential unease, reading Sartre, Camus – and alongside, a lot of Colin Wilson’s non-fiction – starting of course with The Outsider, which focused on some writers I loved. But Wilson, alongside alienation was also looking at its opposite – connection. His writing introduced me to the work of American psychologist Abraham Maslow – which immediately struck a chord.

Western psychiatry, like Western medicine seemed focused on the damage, the lesion, the woundedness of the psyche. Maslow was championing a focus on the health. I suppose he was an early proponent (or a hangover from a much older tradition) of what might be called holistic medicine. Maslow was interested in studying the psychology of the healthy, recognising that this might be something which might be emulated, and, in terms of psyche, found within us all.

Maslow referred to the ‘A-Ha!’ moments, what he called Peak Experiences – that sense of coming right, being in the flow, somehow expanded into a world of meaning, connection. It’s the other side of the coin to that alienated disconnect, the sense of sickness, wrong, discomfort in one’s own skin and the skin of the world.

What has this to do with Yeats? (I can hear the muttering at the back)

Well, as Wilson was writing about Maslow, and Peak Experiences, he illustrated this with four lines from Vacillation, which resonated, profoundly, with me, and not only sent me back to Yeats, but have also been lines rather carved into my being

Yeats wrote the poem, a long and complex one, in middle age. In his 50s, he had long moved away from his sojourn and sympathy with Revolutionary Ireland, away from the lilting misty green lyricism. Politically he had moved rightwards (another reason for falling out of my favour!) in many ways. His poetry felt difficult to me.

In Vacillation, Yeats is looking back and forward on his life. He manifests much cynicism about the world – look at that cynical snarl in the first 3 lines of stanza III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,

But, it is that 4th stanza, for me, the heart of the poem, and a wrenching into reality, that flames into clarity, particularly the last four lines, which are so potent – and something which resonated most powerfully for me:

My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

The language is unerringly simple, almost trite with its rhymes, but the meaning, profound.

And the placement of it, in the midst of some complex dialogues between Heart and Soul, within classical allusions Attis, Lethe, not to mention the Lord of Chou and von Hugel, the reference to whom is by all accounts linked to a book contrasting Homeric and Christian symbolism, is also potent.

There is the complicated surround, a kind of tangle of intellectual, philosophical themes, which almost pushes away and alienates the casual reader – and then, suddenly, in stanza 4, there is the recounting of the most ordinary of events, a prosaic normality, sitting in a café in London – and suddenly , blazing, being blessed, being able to bless.

By setting the A-Ha! The Awake! In the middle of the prosaic, Yeats acknowledges the absolute ordinary extraordinariness of those rapturous, graceful moments where suddenly we arrive at a sense of meaningfulness.

Those four lines have become a kind of mantra for me – a sense that however dark and alienated and full of ‘trivial days’ the world can sometimes seem, or us within that world, those pockets of twenty minute blaze are as much of reality as the sense of alienation. And, I believe the ‘blaze’ trumps the alienation, because the blaze also enfolds and acknowledges the alienation, the sense of blessed and could bless encompasses the knowledge of disconnection, whereas the disconnected moments cannot remember and hold the possibility of the other

And, in an irreverent conclusion, Yeats is clearly advising all of us to keep reading, and to keep reading in cafes: they are clearly excellent for the bless bless moments of awakening!

So, this Irish poet, reminds me, in Reading Ireland Month, how poetry is one of the provokers of the ‘super-reality, awake, awake!’ experience

Here is Yeats, near the end of his life, reading three of his own poems

Gordon Burn – Alma Cogan

Tags

Alma Cogan, Book Review, Gordon Burn, Rants

Fine writing and theme – but is it quite a novel? And, perhaps more pertinently, is it quite ethical?

I read this first quite a long time ago, when it was first published, 1991, and it stayed on my shelves as I thought at some point it might be a re-read. A recent book club choice, its time came, and I found myself not quite so sure the second time around.

Burn was certainly a writer of intelligence, provoking unease in the reader, in part to do with his often unsettling subject matter, but I suspect he is more of a sociologist, a philosopher exploring themes, and, of course, an insightful, incisive journalist (he was) more than a writer of novels.

Alma Cogan was, in the 50s and early 60s, very much a star, in a kind of wholesome family entertainment way which hardly seems to exist anymore. Known as ‘the girl with the giggle in her voice’, she was 4 times the winner of The New Musical Express’s Female Vocalist of the Year competition. Born in Whitechapel in 1932 to a fiercely ambitious Romanian Jewish stage mother, Alma was quickly winning contests, and famous for her glamour. By the early 60’s, with the rise of The Beatles, R+B and teen culture, she was falling out of mainstream favour, though once she had been at the epicentre of popular culture high society. She died young of ovarian cancer in 1966. Quite quickly, a fan culture grew up around her, and she was seen as iconic of a time and place – a little search online reveals her fan industry is still active.

Burn’s book assumes she did not die, and is, in the late 1980s, living a fading, out of the limelight life. The Alma of Burn’s book looks back on her own life, examining a Britain which has gone, where the glamour of the limelight hides the darker side of celebrity and the voracious, obsessive world of fandom. What has gone is not the darker side of celebrity – that has, of course, grown, it is the innocence that believes the shiny face of glamour is real. This Alma is a more intelligent, self-aware and even self-mocking voice than the ‘real Alma’ image presented at the time.

The book disturbed me for a couple of reasons, despite Burn’s brilliance as a writer analysing the spirit of the times through a cleverly structured invention. The book won the Whitbread Prize in the year of its publication. Although he doesn’t play fast and loose with the real Alma’s life, and although it is absolutely made clear at the start of the book that she died in 1966 so all else is invention, the less than flattering making fast and loose with Alma and her relationship with her mother, may well have been highly disturbing to surviving family members.

The second reason, is that as part of Burn’s examination of the darker side of celebrity itself – not so much the darker side of the celebrities, more the dark nature of us, our obsession with it, and our obsession with the seamy and the sordid – obsession with those who become famous for their misdeeds, rather than their talents – he weaves in The Moors Murders of 1966, and particularly the murder of one of the children, Lesley Ann Downey, with a song of Alma’s. The use of a real event – and even the transcript of the tape of her killing which Hindley and Brady made, within the book, seems distasteful, somehow a further abuse of a life cut terribly and violently short, used as a novelist’s device

This book is a very pertinent examination of the whole industry of fame, celebrity culture and how it has changed and developed, and a microscopic dissection of the shadow side of celebrity, the vicarious and slightly sinister quality of fandom. It certainly fulfils one purpose of art – to shock out of complacency, and to force those who encounter it to think, reflect, ponder, and become discomfited, uncomfortable. It does not, at all achieve another purpose which is found in some art – that is, to raise, inspire and aspire to something finer in our nature.

3 ½ rounded to 4 – it is a much more superior novel than ‘okay’ but ‘like’ is not really an appropriate response!

Addendum to review published on the Amazons

It took me an age from reading the book, firstly, to review it at all, because I needed some time to disentangle myself from the reading and reflecting experience enough to assess it. And then it took longer to decide whether it would make this blog or not.

Regular readers know I only review here what I recommend and say ‘read/listen to/watch this’ about, and that I don’t post reviews on here for what I’m personally neutral or negative about – though that indeed may happen on the Amazons.

The problem with the Burn book is that though there is much I admire about it, the reading experience raised a lot of discomfort, distaste and often painful reflection and analysis, which has continued to disturb and perplex me. It is that, the undeniable potency of the book, what Burn is saying, and how he says it, that in the end earns a guarded place here.

I’ve spend days wrestling with that old chestnut which I’m sure we all do to death in our heads not to mention in the cups discussions, essays, dissertations and the like ‘What Is Art FOR, what Is Its Purpose’

There are of course a multiplicity of answers, but one, for me, IS that it makes me look, think, feel, reflect, experience anew.Sometimes that experience may be uplifting, life-enhancing, about growth, development and possibility – and sometimes it may be absolutely the reverse, a kind of diminishment, a kind of distaste, despair – but also a daring to stare into the face of a teeming darkness which is also part of our complex humanity; perhaps a place too terrible to visit often.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
Damien Hirst website

Unsurprisingly, Burn was a friend of that artist who has never been afraid to shock (is he charlatan, is he some kind of truth teller?) Damien Hirst

Burn was a lacerating writer whose work is always dark. He was notable for writing not only fiction (which he used to explore cultural and ethical themes, reflections on the times, the role of the media, spin, fake and deception, as here) but true-crime investigative journalism books. He focused on those whose psyche was indelibly dark and steeped in psychopathology, such as the Wests, the Yorkshire Ripper. These are places I have no desire to go, a darkness too far for anything which might be personally necessary to know.

I am much more interested in the nuances of crossing the line, rather than the extremes which I can’t, or don’t want to, in any way, examine. That is why crime novel about psychopaths and extreme aberrant violence does not interest me. And crime novels about how those who are cut from recognisably the same cloth as I am, do. That, I find fascinating, in a kind of more day-to-day exploration of shadow.

Extreme pathology presented as entertainment is not for me – but Burn is not really doing that. So he throws me back on that old chestnut – why did the writer write this, and does a better purpose excuse unspeakable horrors in art. Pass. Pass, Pass on that one, caught on the fence of don’t know

King Lear has the power to shock because the blinding of Gloucester is meant to provoke our pity and our horror, not just fill us with half revulsed half indulged delight in the gruesome. Plus, I suppose also, the safety of knowing this is unreal, and the blinded one and the blinder are actors, after all. But, what about the newsreel and selfie pictures of horrors as they unfold? We need to know what happens, and the knowledge may shake out out of innocence, may wake us to positive response and action – but how quickly do we end up crossing a line where we are viewing the horror of real agony and suffering for some sort of titillation, some sort of over indulgence of our feelings of revulsion, some kind of version of sentimentality, even?

Maybe we are only the thinnest of whiskers away from the crowds who filled the Coliseum to watch gladiators fight to the death for our entertainment, from those who gathered on Tyburn Hill and at the foot of the Guillotine to watch public execution.

So, I do believe this book should be here, for the days and days it has snarled at me, snagged me, needled me, and continues to do so still to produce something half book review and part unresolved rant

Alma Cogan Amazon UK
Alma Cogan Amazon USA

John Marzillier – The Gossamer Thread: My Life As A Psychotherapist

Tags

Book Review, CBT, John Marzillier, Psychological Therapies, Psychotherapy, The Gossamer Thread: My Life As A Psychotherapist

The Gossamer Thread and The Boundless Ocean

I thoroughly appreciated John Marzillier’s wonderful book on psychological therapy, as the reading of it caused deep reflection which led me into many fields. Not least of which is the whole relationship we have with the reflective activity of reading itself. Doors open, horizons widen, intense emotional experiences and thoughtful, reasoned self-questioning occurs; ideas become developed or discarded; change happens.

I most value those books, fiction or non-fiction, which take me into these areas.

Marzillier’s beautifully titled book explores his own development in the field of psychological therapy, and the development of particular therapeutic approaches, as much as it also explores his successful or less than successful experiences with clients, suitably anonymised, and often with stories changed, to also protect the confidential integrity of the client’s story, in case a former client reads and thinks ‘that is me!’

John Marzillier almost stumbled into clinical work by default, beginning to work using behavioural techniques – a very reductive, lab-rat approach (or so it seems to this reader) in the late 60s and early 70s. The model, it seems, was heavily based on physiology and learned behaviours, biased towards large scale statistical ‘objective’ scientific studies, and drew much of its methodology from observed animal behaviour. However, Marzillier was beginning to feel uneasy, as ’something’ was missing in this approach, and almost by instinct he found himself, through a more dynamic engaged relationship with individual clients, drawn to exploring thought processes and even gaining curiosity about ‘back stories’

In fact, he was moving closer to embracing the role of the relationship between client and practitioner as integral to treatment. The ‘relational field’ approach though was still in the future for his work. This is a concept central within psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytical approaches, but was barely engaged with by the more ‘impartial’ scientific observational ideology of the behavioural approach.

He began to formally train in a then new discipline, cognitive therapy, examining the internal thought processes, the scripts and dialogues which run through our heads. Cognitive therapy of course, in tandem with the earlier behavioural approach, became mainstream as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

My sense, reading this book is that perhaps Marzillier was always as much an artist as a scientist, and therefore, by his own nature, more likely to find that any approach which has fairly set protocols, and a fairly rigid methodology might quickly begin to seem as if it were missing something. It seems to me that no one method or approach, in this field, is ever going to be successful with all people, at all times. What the left brain approach lacks is the imaginative gestalt, the whole-person poetry of the various strands of ‘relational’ right brain methods. Science versus art of psyche.

Marzillier ended up having a kind of revelation, listening to a lecture given by Dorothy Rowe, well-known for her work in the field of depression, about the centrality of core belief and how it can become entwined with one’s very identity. A belief may be useful or destructive, but even a self-destructive and painful core belief can provide the security of comfort – a reinforcements of the sense of self. To LOSE, for example, the certainly that life is meaningless or you yourself are worthless and bad things happen to you because you are worthless can be a frightening change too far – though a belief may or may not be a helpful one to an individual,  – and may or may not be right, it is YOURS. We all struggle with complex responses to being WRONG

His process of progression from scientific certainty, where the steps are known, and the methods can be approached sequentially, so that the method, not the person employing the method ‘makes’ the cure, eventually led him to the uncharted, waters of the mysterious ‘unknown’ of other, and the personal, uncertain route of that more narrative, right brain approach. I had a sense of the psychodynamic psychotherapist (a further training in this followed) like a boat in the middle of an ocean, lacking a map, with destination unknown, steering by instinct, feeling, sense, gut reaction on a journey of trust with his client. This sort of work comes closer to the relationships we have with ‘the others that are not self’ as we move through life. There are forms and structures, rough maps and sketched instructions which guide us, but the relationship between self and any other is something like a dance, which though the steps may be known, veers off into something jazzy, freeform, improvisational. Things may go horribly wrong, and the dancers fall over, step on each others’ toes – but they may also get to a dazzling, inventive, dynamic place with their dance.

Later, his journey takes him into analysis, to experience the procedure from the other side. He is as thoughtful about himself as an analysand, as he is about his patients, teasing out his sense of the process, and his resistance

As Marzillian points out, there are difficulties in psychoanalysis being properly verified by the statistical tools – because it is not dealing in certainties, but in ambiguities – the subjectivity of the practitioner is always within the encounter. There is not a set protocol of method, session to session, with set aims and objectives. This is the very real challenge of that therapy. It seems to me that IF the practitioner is both skilful, and congruent , on some deep level, with the client, the work can be amazing, profound, transformational. It is about much more than the client being free of the ‘symptom’ which brought them into treatment, and about much more than the client being ‘made well’ by the method – or by the therapist using ‘the method’. Instead, there is the possibility of (like with any authentic human encounter), both participants stepping into ‘meaning’ An epiphany of sorts, if you will. The big problem of course, is that it always beset around by those IFS.

Like that other wonderful writer in this field – the humanistic, existentialist psychotherapist Irvin D Yalom, Marzillier is steeped with a sense of art, awareness of metaphor, the poetic. He often illustrates by using literary allusion – literature is indeed a potent source helping us to understand the depth and vitality of human experience.

Marzillier also writes not only with warmth, clarity and authenticity – but with a fine sense of the absurd humour that is to be found in even the most serious places.

What is also utterly compelling about this journey Marzillier takes the reader through, is that he is a man who accepts the confusions, the hesitations, the contradictions within any ‘method’ No wonder he embarked on so many trainings, with that recognition that any one party line is too reductive and fixed to capture human exchanges in all their complexity

Or, as he more cogently puts it

If I have learned anything from a lifetime career as a psychotherapist, it is that there is no universal truth, that everyone is different, and that you, the reader, should take what I or anyone else tells you about psychotherapy with a large pinch of salt

The Gossamer Thread Amazon UK
The Gossamer Thread Amazon USA

Flora Rheta Schreiber – Sybil

Tags

Book Review, Dr Cornelia Wilbur, Flora Rheta Schreiber, Psychoanalysis, Shirley Ardell Mason, Sybil

More of the cells in our bodies do not share our DNA than are ‘us’ – we are indeed all multiples

I read this fascinating account of dissociation and fragmentation into multiple personalities many years ago, but have just re-read it, after reading a completely different kind of book (a novel) which dealt with the subject, and was, in my opinion, a poor book.

It did perform the valuable service of sending me back to Flora Rheta Schreiber’s account of the psychoanalysis of ‘Sybil’ a 16 multiple personality. Sybil was analysed by Dr Cornelia Wilbur in the 1950s. Schreiber was a journalist and writer who specialised in the field of psychiatry. Her book was initially published in the 70s

It was an extremely fascinating re-read: the book had made a very strong impression on me, raising as it did questions about identity, however the re-read shows me much about my own development and understanding, as some questions which puzzled me on first reading have been answered as my own shifting perceptions about the nature of healing and holism have grown, and, perhaps, I have a greater personal understanding of the observer as an identity: a concept of the reflective mind which can stand outside the sometimes suffering deeply subjective and reactive self, and observe what is arising.

Without wishing to spoil the fascinating journey which awaits the reader of this well written book, which was written with the agreement of course of both the analysand (integrated Sybil) and her analyst, the basic overview is as follows:

Born in the 1920s into a rigid, repressed Christian sect household, in Wisconsin, with a history of mental illness, particularly on her mother’s side, Sybil had an extraordinary and terrible childhood visited on her by her mother, who was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Hattie, like Sybil herself, was highly intelligent and creative, but her own background was also one which warped and stifled her. Hattie was a terrifyingly cruel and vengeful woman, from an early age. Sybil’s father, Willard, was complicit in his daughter’s illness, which began at the age of 3, by failing to acknowledge Sybil’s mistreatment and by being too fixated on his standing within the rigid, narrow-minded community and its hellfire-and-damnation faith.

Blue Is The Colour of Love – Artwork by ‘Sybil’ – Shirley Ardell Mason

On my initial reading, I completely understood the ‘normal’ roots of multiple personalities. We are all ‘multiples’ : how often might any of us use such terminology as ‘part of me (for example) loves socialising, but another part of me craves solitude and I need to be alone for periods of time in order to stay whole ’ – so, we are all a mix of sometimes contradictory needs. Yet the ‘normal’ contradictions of part of me, part of me, are cohered into the sense that overall is an ‘I’ who contains these parts.

On first reading, I also clearly understood and had familiarity with the idea, in Jungian terms, of ‘the shadow’ – those aspects of self we might not wish to own – mainly emotions which are felt to be unacceptable or shameful. We all have shadow aspects, according to what our own upbringing and culture deems is acceptable or not – and indeed what is deemed acceptable depending on society’s view of gender, and how women or men are supposed to be.

The difference between disassociation and the conscious or unconscious holding of the shadow however, is that, however uncomfortable, for most of us, we might fly into a destructive rage and be ‘beside myself with rage’ (there’s the inherent normal arising of the shadow within our language) – an indication that the raging one stands at a slight remove from the everyday ‘me’ – but the ‘me’ always knows that however beside myself I might have been – I broke the crockery in my rage. Me, not another, I own and remember it when I calm down, say sorry – and pay for replacements!

However, sometimes, and it is particularly as a result of huge traumatic, often huge traumatically repeated early events, particularly if these occur within the family itself, and even more particularly when the family denies the reality of what the child experienced, or even dis-allows the arising emotions, then the strange way out is to split off from self, in order to allow another to hold the emotion. The original personality may NOT EVEN KNOW that this has happened. This was certainly the case with ‘Sybil’ where early dissociated personalities ‘held’ her anger and her fear, for example.

What I did not completely understand until much later, on this re-read – it had interested me for many years – is that one of her personalities, the one who ‘knew’ all the others, the observant watcher, was extremely ‘whole’ I could not understand intellectually how this attractive person was hidden from ‘Sybil’. But that was before experiencing how mind functions within meditation, and how the observer can even observe the observer observing – degrees of integration of ‘self’-and-not-self.

Even more potently, I have come to understand something which is fundamental within vitalism and holism, namely, that whatever the dis-ease, there is an inherent movement towards health within all living organisms – this is in psyche as evidently as it is in soma. The concept is that of homeostasis and balance, and is always evident, from the most structural nuts-and-bolts of biology (the skin’s ability to repair itself, for example) to the most intangible, within subtle or energetic structures.

In the light of this, the existence of those personalities who seemed MORE than the depleted Sybil made sense. The most complete of her personalities, –  of course, they were all ‘her’ – even acted as co-therapist.

Our medical model inevitably makes us focus on ‘where is the lesion’ – where does fracture or unwellness lie. This of course is extremely important – but just as important, particularly in the field of psyche, is to ask ‘where is the health, and to find that impulse to health, wholeness and cohesion which is within any living organism. Indeed, wider than that even – it is the forces within the structure of matter itself, the material universe, which contains the binding together and the flying apart.

What a very valuable new as well as revisited journey this fabulous book gave me!

‘Sybil’ (her true identity within the book was kept hidden, Dr Wilbur’s identity is what it was – and all 3 women are now dead) was also turned into a couple of made for TV movies.

Cornelia Wilbur

Sybil’s story continues to haunt and stir up controversy. After all three women (‘Sybil’ herself, her analyst, and the writer of the book) had died, a book was written claiming that the 3 women had perpetuated a hoax. It is of course interesting that the writer of THAT book did not write her book until the participants were no longer able to answer back – or sue!

Another writer who befriended ‘Sybil’ wrote a book which verified the original story and included further testimony from people who knew ‘Sybil’ and her family. This book also refutes the evidence presented in the ‘hoax’ book. Clearly, one part had some agenda, and both the readers of the original book, the hoax book and the refutation of hoax book will be convinced, or not convinced, and become partisan of one side or another – or say ‘whatever’

This feeds into debates about ‘false memory syndrome’ – sure, absolutely FMS does exist, and highly suggestible subjects can uncover ‘memory’ can seek to ‘please’ a therapist by giving them the story they expect to find. To acknowledge that however should not negate stories of childhood abuse. There has been a tendency for hardline ‘false memory syndrome’ champions to therefore say all stories of this ilk are false.

Sybil’s own story links with this – and the existence of ‘multiples’ – now described as the more clinical dissociative personality disorder, has, with reclassification, been similarly questioned as to its integrity.

That there was real warmth and trust which developed between Sybil and her therapist, so the relationship became as much friend as doctor patient, is obvious. Sybil certainly was dreadfully damaged by her childhood, and her therapist, who related to her less clinically than most mainstream analysts would these days find professional, may make a modern practitioner hiss in disapproval. But it has always also been true that, if it is in the best interests of the client, some ‘rules’ may be better broken, on very rare occasions ‘Boundaries’ are an important, crucial cornerstone of practice. However Dr Wilbur’s clear regard for Sybil (and the Sybils) as a person, rather than purely coolly offering support and encouragement and acceptance to a client because of professionalism, seems to have been quite hugely instrumental in Sybil’s healing.

Its important to say the ‘broken boundaries’ were not in any way abusive, or exploitative, but Wilbur and Sybil (and Flora Rheta Schreiber) became friends and met outside the therapy sessions. Not something which most therapists would feel appropriate, but in this complex case, Sybil, who had never trusted, who became afraid of all intimacy, learned she could trust in large part through Wilbur’s friendship, encouragement and support outside sessions. Wilbur even treated Sybil for free for a long time, and this was an act of faith FOR Sybil that at some point, she would heal enough to work, to express her creativity and be paid for it, and so in the end be able to pay for those sessions

Wilbur had hidden Sybil’s identity. The later books reveal Sybil to have been Shirley A. Mason

Flora Rheta Schreiber

As stated above, I was fascinated by this book decades ago, and still remain so

Sybil Amazon UK
Sybil Amazon USA

Bret Easton Ellis as a launching pad for a Rant on the beauty of dapple!

Tags

Bret Easton Ellis, Chaim Soutine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Flanery, Soapbox, Stephen Sondheim, William Blake

I have just finished reading Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules Of Attraction, which will not appear as a review on this blog, as I only blog what I am recommending (for the interested, the Amazons do carry reviews of what I disliked as well as what I raved about)

And I cordially loathed ROA. The choice of adverb is crucial – I loathed it through the heart, because it has no heart. Yes, I see what Easton Ellis is doing, laying out the spoils of a wasted, superficial, whining, shallow, self-obsessed, privileged group of Fratters at an American campus university in the 80s, but the problem is that Easton Ellis exposes their puerile, meaningless, unlikeable mass persona through an endless and superficial sneer mask.

One thing my reading did do, however (so well done, Ellis, there) is that it gave me days of impassioned debate and self-reflection on many things, thus fulfilling one of the purposes of art – to awaken, to make the reader/listener/observer notice, to make them think, respond, debate, engage.

And sometimes, what is perceived as ‘not good’ by the consumer of the art-work challenges much more than what reinforces or deepens one’s existing philosophies

Rules of Attraction is an unending expose of superficiality. The unlikeable characters are unvarying in their endless progression of barfing, whining about getting meaningless leg-overs or not getting meaningless leg overs. Pretty loathsome, there is no sense of the writer engaging with them, going below their surface. I guess he dismisses his characters as being no more than their boring and self-indulgent self-obsessions. A couple of thoughts surfaced on this, Firstly, I have never met anyone who is unremittingly one-note.

What is fascinating about living creatures, and the more complex those creatures are, the more they become fascinating in this way – and a self-aware being most of all – is the ‘dappleness’ of them. For what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘Pied Beauty’

All things counter, original, spare, strange

No one is either/or; all are and, and, and then more and. Take the time to explore any individual, and this leads to constant surprise, and anyone and everyone will yield they are more, much more, than the sum of their perceived parts – whether you have placed them on the side of the angels or the devil-with-all-the-best-tunes.

Where I say my loathing of Easton Ellis’s book is ‘cordial’ it is precisely through its shallow, superficial view. I really don’t like or have much time for those anguished over-privileged souls who are going through that stage where they are living in a constant in your face scream of over-indulgent self-mutilation. But Tell me, or better still, show me something NEW about them Mr Ellis – dismissing the ‘other’ is so very easy to do, smugly judging from my own superior sensibility is effortless. What I want from art is to shock me out of complacent dismissal of other – and make me see and feel them, make me walk some distance in their shoes. Take me to that uncomfortable, challenging place, rather than the easy, superior dismissal.

Great writing, in my book, humanises the subjects being written about – however base or noble they may appear, they need fleshing with the complexity of us all. We all know that we are not ‘just’ whatever facets of ourselves are visible, even to ourselves. Complex living creatures are full of surprise, and self-surprise

One of the facets I most valued in a sadly underrated, under-hyped book I read earlier this year, Patrick Flanery’s Fallen Land, is that he was able to take an extremely unlikeable central character, and without in any way condoning him, wrote him (indeed, possesses the gift to write all his characters) from within their experience, rather than the lordly creator god in judgement. Flanery writes ‘dapple’ – inhabiting a character both from outside (through the eyes of other) and from inside.

Ellis is writing, I think, from a sensibility of ‘life is nasty-brutish-and-short’ – and moreover, sometimes ‘life is nasty-brutish-and-short-but-feels-as-if-it-endures-painfully-for-an-aeon’

And, of course, this is  A truth – this is indeed (the awareness of our mortality, existential despair and unease, sometimes overwhelming) part of what drives the nasty, and the brutish (the endless barf, the endless meaningless leg over as an attempt to deny that awareness, or escape it), but is only a very partial truth. The Hollywood bows and happy wrap ending is, sure, superficial and childish, immature – BUT so is the unremitting savagery and wastedness. The all dark and the all happy clappy equally missing – by miles, the infinitely more complex and difficult, challenging and confusing, nature of reality

I am more interested in art which makes me see within the surface of ugliness to find the surprise of beauty. The French painter Soutine, endlessly painting decaying meat, performed this  feat, rendering the response of disgust into seeing  something new, some vibrant life in death

Sometimes it seems as if our tastes have become so very jaded that all we are able to respond to is the shock of being relentlessly beaten over the head with a hammer. Shock is relatively easy to achieve – just shout  ‘Boo’ in the ear of the unwary – surprise is something rather more subtle.

Sometimes it seems as if being edgy, in your face and shouting a lot gets mistaken for the voice of authenticity; reality seen as only the nasty.

Show me the maggot at the heart of the Rose, the invisible worm, fine. But do at least show me the Rose as well.

Life affirming art is neither the chocolate boxy saccharine nor the unremitting display of meaningless degradation. Rather, life affirmation connects with reality (whether in that affirmation as lived, or created in art to show us the affirmation) precisely because it accepts the all-that-is – the deep despair that lies beneath the curiously unquenchable joy, the sweet intensity of an incandescent moment which is incandescent precisely because ‘this too will pass’ We are all on borrowed time.

kuddlyteddybear’s 2004 photostream, Flicr, Commons

What is it that is so compelling to us, about sunsets but the sense of blaze and despair combined, at the dying of the light – something primeval gets touched. I believe in oppositions, rather than the easy way of this OR that, as I see the oppositions and the reconciliations which they contain, all around.

I think of the wonderful, life affirming musical by Stephen Sondheim, Sunday In The Park with George, which captures so beautifully what it is that is important – the embracing of the fullness of the moment, finding a way to touch, with meaning, the little space and time allotted to us. The song ‘Children and Art‘ illustrating this perfectly

And (how wonderful) – someone has uploaded the TV version of the production, starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, in its entirety on You Tube! What i appreciate about Sondheim is the edge between the pain and the joy of the moment, and the acceptance that both ARE.
(the music does not start till after the titles and scrolling introduction)

However, it took the ire I felt at the dead inhumanity (as i see it) of Ellis’ vision to bludgeon me into a meaningful (for myself, at least) reflection on reality, and creative vision. So, if not quite respeck, at least thanks.

By Their Words Ye Shall Know Them – The Giveaway of Corporate Speak

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Brand loyalty, Business, Company, Corporation, Linguistics, Marketing and Advertising, Soapbox

I am fascinated by what might lie behind concept holding words which come into common usage, perhaps replacing words which were previously used.

A particular such, which makes me SPIT in disgust and contempt (ok, I don’t really spit, but the disgust and contempt is very real) is the concept of BRAND as in brand loyalty.

            Parson’s Dance Company and East Village Opera Company

I can understand the concept of company loyalty, based on the meaning of a word. Company, whether or not a PARTICULAR company in the organisational, business field embraces these concepts or not, is a lateral, inclusive, equality imbued concept. Linguistic connections abound – ‘com’ with ‘comme’ like/alike – companion, companionship, compadre, comrade. It is a concept which is about live, living beings – generally human. We don’t think of company as a group noun for inanimate objects. A company of shoes, or saucepans, for example.

The above image is an illustration of the creativity, the individuality and the collectivity of ‘com’ – the with, equal nature of company. Not that every company dances and sings, but still……………………

I CAN have loyalty to a company I might work for because my companionship will be linked to those compatriots I work with. It is a human, shared, concept, holding the intangible – fellow feeling (that other, powerful, com word – compassion)

Leiden Museum Pedro Layent Photostream, Flicr, Commons

Companies grow and often then become corporate. Conceptionally, in my mind, a bad move. Already, there is a diminishment in the human scale. Corpus, of the body. The intangible is already leaking away, dead (corpse) What happened to the dynamic warmth of company? All we have now is something which is more mechanical. The corporeal is  easier to objectivise, Company is a you and me, an us. Corporation is subject, object.  Where is the spirit of companionship in that corporation?

Without any sense of irony, the corporate speak talks not about loyalty to ‘the company’ – that is you and me, compadre, but loyalty to ‘the brand’ Somehow, the human has become the thing. So ‘brand loyalty’ becomes not just wanting me as a consumer to buy what she sells rather than what he sells, but working within an organisation, workers may be asked also to demonstrate ‘brand loyalty’. ‘My brand right or wrong’ Brand used as synonymous with what once was company

However……

The brand implies something owned. Its about possession. It reeks of authoritarian hierarchy. The rancher brands his cattle, to show he owns them. Convicts were branded to show the crimes they had committed that offended those who judged them.

The brand is a mark of humiliation

Cattle branding, Wiki Commons

How curious, and how very very apt that The Brand is the concept of the corporate world.

No, I have no brand loyalty. Only to my own spit, and of course to my compadres.

The Prescient View of Science Fiction writers

Tags

Book Review, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Science fiction, SF, Soapbox

Ray Bradbury –  Fahrenheit 451

Back whenever, Science Fiction was a genre I never thought about, convinced that such writers were (sorry, this is about my previous prejudices, and may not reflect reality about the genre, then or now AT ALL) geeky guys without social skills stuck in a 7 year old comic book fantasy of space-ships, ray-guns, stun-guns, giant robotic females with mammaries the size of whoopee cushions, who happened to be coloured green or red and had just dropped in from Venus or Mars.

It took me some time to realise that some writers whom I thought of as pretty thoughtful and thought provoking – H.G.Wells, George Orwell. (I liked their politics too) John Wyndham, even Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) were also writing in this genre. Science Fiction in the hands of these writers had far less to do with ray guns (or even Ray-Bans) and had everything to do with a device for looking at our society.

Then no less an admired writer (by me) than Doris Lessing began to write the stuff in the Canopus In Argos series, and moreover began banging the SF drum, saying that some of the most exciting writing was happening in the genre, as it was a perfect medium for Society to examine itself. Big ethical and philosophical ideas of now and the future could be teased out and examined, and moreover, of course, SF was a way of looking at what both a Utopia and a Dystopia might look like – or even whether Utopia itself was in fact really achievable, or just another Dystopia.

Added to my roster of other writers to admire (and I liked their politics!) were of course Lessing herself, Ursula K Le Guin and Sheri Tepper – not to mention Margaret Atwood and even Marge Piercy in Woman On The Edge Of Time. Suddenly it seemed as if there were a whole raft of feminist writers – fine writers, feminists, turning to this genre as a way of exploring gender politics, socialism – and I realised, hey, you know what, I LIKE SF!

Anyway, this preamble has brought me to re-reading some earlier SF classics, – most recently, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Now Bradbury in this book may not be writing such well crafted complex characters as some of those writers I have mentioned, and the plot itself may even be a bit sparse or creaky, but my goodness, I am shocked and chilled and awed by how much of today’s culture he was predicting 60 years ago

Reality TV where we all become content not only to watch others living, rather than living ourselves, but, no doubt, the next step arriving very soon where our TV becomes interactive and we ourselves get inserted as bit players in the soaps we watch, or software that inserts our names into live TV, so that the TV talks directly to us, with announcers addressing us directly. Then we can live even less.

He seems to have mainlined into the fact that we have dumbed culture down, his description of the way people talk to each other so that actually they are not talking about anything at all seems unnervingly like the “and then he said, he was like, it was, you know, like, it was, yeah, no, know what I mean?” babble.  You hear these conversations all around, more and more being said without any meaning:

 People don’t talk about anything’…’They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else

He predicts also the worst excesses of PC speak, and puts his finger neatly on the button of our expectation of happiness as a right, our inability to come to terms with the fact that pain and suffering are a real part of embodiment, of living in a world of matter. The best, the justest, the fairest society will not be able to end our personal suffering

 Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these

I was shaking my head in amazement at the accurate identification of our can’t be still, can’t reflect society which settles for circuses (never mind the bread) and drinks, drugs, medicates, and buys its way out of having to acknowledge that pain is an unavoidable part of life itself – we will grow old (if we are that lucky); we will have to manage the loss, at some point, of those we love, and we too will die.

There is more – a society which cannot deal with complexity, with the fact there may not always be an obvious right and an obvious wrong, and this too, we cannot bear. One of the great challenges are situations where whatever action is taken, it will not be without some great cost, and yet we have to take some action, as the not taking an action is of course itself an act. Events in Syria are so much illustrative of this. I am minded of W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst
Are full of Passionate intensity

How do we live having let go of  the comfortable and childish security of a world which is black OR white, and let ourselves inhabit that more confusing  challenging world filled with ever more subtle complexities of paradoxes, conflicts and oppositions coexisting together into and and, rather than either or?

 If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

And, seeing ahead to the vapid game show, where factual knowledge gives us the illusion we have intelligence and wisdom

 Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving

He talks also about our inability to bear silence – everyone cushioned from the world by their own blare of noise wall to wall music piped into our heads, children plonked in front of the pabulum TV, learning early to be passive not interactive, – even the fashion for elective caesarians on non-medical grounds.

What makes this book so powerful still is the fact that so much of its dystopian vision is the way our lives actually are; not in fact so much ‘science fiction’ after all, rather a sociological analysis

We don’t need giant invaders from other galaxies with super powerful rare weapons to destroy us, and our world. We are ourselves those violent, aggressive, alien invaders

Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK
Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK

Singing from the same hymn sheet, jargon, and the poet’s view

Tags

Philosophy, Reflection, Soapbox, Writing

I’m currently reading a book written by a Western Buddhist, and struggling with it a lot. It is not, however, the teaching which is the source of my struggle and irritation. It is the writing.

More and more I find it is less and less what something is ABOUT that matters to me; it is the voice itself. This may mean that in the end I am doomed to be forever style over substance, and on one level this is true. However another way of experiencing this is that what interests me is the story, and can the storyteller make me experience the story.

This is as true for me in ‘texts about facts’ as it is in fiction. It is always an illusion to say a fact is devoid of an interpretation of it. Our subjectivity is always within the objective.

What has this got to do with the book about Buddhism?

It is this – any ism way of viewing the world, faith based, political, philosophical carries its own jargon within it, which means something to the cognoscenti, and is of course a very useful shorthand. But one of the major problems of jargon is that over time, its well-worn grooves move further and further away from the immediacy which caused their initial creation. And so the writing connects less and less with the experience.

There is a particular strand I come across in a lot of Western Buddhist instructional – I suppose vaguely ‘self-help’ writing which is intensely (I really mean over intensely) pragmatic salt-of-the-earth writing (or speaking) It’s the ‘monkey mind’ ‘loving instruction of a puppy’ the ‘be-here’ which is all about the (apologies to the easily offended) ’you have to smell the shit, taste the shit’ approach. Once, maybe with the first person who spoke those words or wrote those words, their effect was immediate, direct and wake-up. Now (for me) they are without power and jaded. Singing from the same hymn-sheet can mean singing by rote on auto-pilot, a mindless musical mumble of a well-worn groove.

The best writers, it seems to me (on anything) are those with poetic sensibilities. And by that I am not talking about intensely lyrical writing. What the poet does, because of the strictures imposed by form, is to carefully make words work. The best writers (in any medium) do not take their words lightly. Writing can be extremely plain and pared down to the bone, and yet be poetical in immediacy. What poetry and poets (if they are skillful!) does, and do, is to freshly mint the experience for the reader or listener. Poets (whether they write poetry or not) shake us awake into sharing the experience. They take the cliché of Moons/Junes/Hearts/Flowers used as symbols of love (or whatever) and break them apart.

Back to the self-help Buddhist book. What I suppose irritates even more is the unremitting focus on being pragmatic, on escaping the trap of illusion, facing things as they ARE. Well, life may be full of shit – but it is also full of stardust, mystery, the unfathomable. Personally, as reader, neither the shit nor the stardust in writing will work when their description relies on cliché.

Which is not to say the writer needs to try and forever shock or be ‘new’. But the writer does need to find a way to make sure they have not placed cliché between the thing itself and their truthful experience of it

I do like reading books which come from various – vexed word – ‘spiritual traditions.’ Which I suppose means books which grapple with what is not ultimately tangible. And some of these are written by atheists.

Perhaps in the end it comes down to personality – who finds the words that ignite you into really being here, waking up, and being able to hold (metaphorically, I think!) the shit and the stardust together.

Nothing is new, everything has been said before – but maybe a way of saying what has been said before makes it new enough to be heard, or seen, as if for the first time.

Paradoxically, some of the writers who have connected most with the ‘is-ness’ have not been writing from any ‘spiritual’ or instructional place. And the one I come back to, as sure pointer, is the Scottish poet Andrew Grieg, whose At The Loch of The Green Corrie is a deep delight. Michael Mayne, a Christian cleric, and Richard Holloway, one time Bishop of Edinburgh, and now atheist, are others. The nature poet and writer Kathleen Jamie is yet another. None say anything which has not been said before (philosophically) except, through the immediacy of language which is from their own tongues, this reader experiences the matter of their writing in immediacy.