20 8 2010
I've been in Moreton-in-the-Marsh on holiday, with a day trip to Oxford for old times sake walking round the Parks and spending book tokens in Blackwells, the Blackwells in Oxford has an incredibly helpful and knowledgeable staff, it's a joy to spend money in there. I save most of my book buying until I can go to Blackwells in Oxford, if I want to find rude unhelpful staff I can go into the retail outlets in the shopping centre here where there is a bookshop of sorts but it's there to shift commodities so all the staff need to know is how to work the tills, or into the clothes shops where I can be sneered at and have comments passed about me till I'm bright red with self consciousness and I can get that on the streets. Finding staff who have heard of the book I want to buy and will help me find it in the Norrington Room is my holiday treat. I wouldn't live in Oxford, as Gunter Grass said of Berlin during the Cold War and the days of the Iron Curtain, this north east London borough is closest to the realities of the age, and for another bookish reference, like the Garden House of Suleiman the Red, the ends of the earth meet here, migrants from every continent on the planet can be found in the queue for kebabs at Seth's Spice Hut in the market and many many languages can be heard. Seth's is closed for Ramadan the blessed month of fasting and prayer for Moslems, Seth's has a notice blessing us all before it shuts in a true spirit of multiculturalism, trade has always broken through barriers.
Moreton-in-the-Marsh had a sharp reminder of the realities of the age, a drunken group of young locals in the flower of their youth and strength stupidly mocking and reviling an elderly couple who were minding their own business and out for a stroll, their mothers would have been proud I'm sure and they were so drunk they could barely stand, the young men I mean. Then in the big garden of the Bell a family of small boys were playing the most imaginative games in a sort of hut designed to be child height. It was an outpost of an embattled army, a secret society and protection from wicked monsters in turn, a fat small girl on a bike joined in tentatively, at first she was outside the game but when she fell off her bike one little lad helped her up and let her join in in case she had hurt herself and was unhappy. The parents of the lads let them play but checked them if their play looked like getting out of hand, the lads were biddable, not cowed by parental authority but kept civilised when they got wild, so they played riotous games and enjoyed themselves and their parents could talk adult talk, a far happier arrangement than drinking so much ale it made one stupefied and bestial enough to insult the elderly. Both of these are subjects for poems, not from me as omnipotent observer thinking Great Thoughts but from one human being watching others, like journalism watching and thinking and reporting, every one of us is at the cutting edge of the realities of the age, we only have to keep our eyes open.
I am free to be ignored, of course. My chapbook Alice Wore a Red Dress has been twice and glowingly reviewed in Awen and Carillon, it costs £3 inclusive of postage and packaging, cheques payable to Anne Rees to be sent to said name, 23 Cassiobury Rd, London E17 7JD and you'll receive a copy by return of post, but no-one has asked for a copy. The poems I revised out of their skins have all come sorrowfully home except for the three I sent to The Rialto, they are out with other magazines now and I've started using the notes I made in Moreton-in-the-Marsh to write more and I've departed from the "little" format I've used, anything under the sun or stars can make a poem so I am expanding my range. Bugger it, I'm both free and ignored so I'll follow my bent to the utmost to satisfy my own instincts for what is true and I'll set down what I see as dramatically as I see it! You can't beat the drama of the streets lit fitfully by neon, the copper chopper directly over head beating down the air and sirens screaming out of Tottenham and Leyton and I can flit that path walking fast and come to no harm although I exchange banter over my shoulders with youths as carried away as I am. Who wants temporary status when the drama of the twilight streets is at hand? And that's why I'd never live in Oxford, it'd be like fossilised youth when there is so much more to be seen and experienced at the age I am. On That note I'll leave you and since this is Ramadan God bless. |Anne Rees.
Friday 20 August 2010
Sunday 27 June 2010
Science and religion
27 6 2010
I've been revising poems out of their little skins, and have just written a nice knotty bit of theology about how much we can hate one another, as the people who executed Jesus or rather caused his execution hated him: he forgave them and died to take away their sin but what a terrible way to go! No wonder his sweat was like boiling drops of blood in Gethsemane, knowing what he had to look forwards to and praying to let this cup pass. Atheist or Christian, you have to be compelled by the human drama of the passion though it's an uncomfortable thing to contemplate, the Nazis crucified at least one priest and who knows what goes on in some dictatorships so the passion can't be dismissed as historical in some far off time when people hated and killed each other, look at Stalin's chilling comment, one murder is dreadful, 27 million murders are just a statistic. Pol Pot seemed to have the same ideas and recently the tidal wave that devastated Burma dropped out of the News when the regime in power sternly repelled offers of international aid, after that came a blank, a black out of information but people must have suffered and died. In this context the idea that surged beneath the surface in eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down is cheering: one joke is a tiny revolution. Long may people all over the world dare to crack jokes about their governing powers like the one about secret policemen, why do they go round in threes? One can read, one can write and the third keeps a sharp eye on the two intellectuals!
Madness is caused by evil, cruelty and hatred, oh I know there's genetic evidence linking psychosis to a certain genetic makeup but that's like saying it's human nature, genetic composition comes linked to a person in his or her own right with relationships, a history and set of personal circumstances. Madness isn't meaningless nor does it descend out of a clear blue sky quite randomly, something has to trigger the flux of dopamine and that is sharp distress of some sort, show me someone diagnosed with a psychotic illness and I'll bet money there's a deeply unhappy person there made so by cruelty and hatred from other people. Madness has a function, it shows it does matter if we're horrid to one another this is not an amoral world, our words and deeds are deeply significant and evil ones drive people mad. If you like it is a spiritual barometer registering the evil people do, as unhappiness is, we all have the capacity to be miserably unhappy given certain circumstances so that must be in our genetic makeup as well, see what I mean that catch all explanation is unhelpful and no explanation at all. It's like the bit in CS Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Eustace says in our world a star is a blazing cloud of gas. He is told no, that's what a star is made of not what it is.
Relying on a basic scientific "explanation" to the disregard of everything else would be like telling someone "Your genetic composition causes your person to trigger in me a mating instinct" instead of saying "I love you". I know which would be more likely to get me into bed, science is bloody good stuff for cause and effect and some intriguingly intricate explanations of the natural world, long live science but not to the exclusion of religion, literature and all our feelings. After all, having the explanation of the visible spectrum is fascinating but it doesn't describe the beauty of a rainbow, science enhances the beauty of the planet with understanding of the various lives and functions involved, science can't describe the effect of springtime, all that lovely greenness and buds opening from no human cause. And pretty silly we'd look if springtime failed, to understand it should be to cherish it with humility and gratitude, not to think we own it and it's come about exclusively for our benefit. Religion is blind without science, as Einstein remarked, adding that science would be lame without religion.
When I was mad the psychotherapists I saw told me I'd be cured if I admitted to hating my mother. Now that is bad science and one eyed science, for starters my Dad's behaviour to my dying mother had driven me mad and though my Mum was a tough character to be trusted with the tender care of three daughters she didn't want, I wanted to understand her better and find resolution, not chuck all the blame on her stupidly and misogynistically. I put up resistance to this idea and they started trying to trick me into slagging off my Mum, were they being bad mothers was that why I was angry? Etc etc. At that point I shut up, they weren't listening and were trying to twist my words, which chimed with rather a lot of childhood experience I wanted to understand better, not revert to like a cross two year old and scream and kick on the floor. Reading Charlotte Bronte's Shirley has helped me understand my Mum better, she was very like Mrs Yorke and like the character couldn't help her nature, there are some wonderful portraits from real life in the minor characters in Shirley, I'll leave you with a strong recommendation to get hold of a copy and read it!
I've been revising poems out of their little skins, and have just written a nice knotty bit of theology about how much we can hate one another, as the people who executed Jesus or rather caused his execution hated him: he forgave them and died to take away their sin but what a terrible way to go! No wonder his sweat was like boiling drops of blood in Gethsemane, knowing what he had to look forwards to and praying to let this cup pass. Atheist or Christian, you have to be compelled by the human drama of the passion though it's an uncomfortable thing to contemplate, the Nazis crucified at least one priest and who knows what goes on in some dictatorships so the passion can't be dismissed as historical in some far off time when people hated and killed each other, look at Stalin's chilling comment, one murder is dreadful, 27 million murders are just a statistic. Pol Pot seemed to have the same ideas and recently the tidal wave that devastated Burma dropped out of the News when the regime in power sternly repelled offers of international aid, after that came a blank, a black out of information but people must have suffered and died. In this context the idea that surged beneath the surface in eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down is cheering: one joke is a tiny revolution. Long may people all over the world dare to crack jokes about their governing powers like the one about secret policemen, why do they go round in threes? One can read, one can write and the third keeps a sharp eye on the two intellectuals!
Madness is caused by evil, cruelty and hatred, oh I know there's genetic evidence linking psychosis to a certain genetic makeup but that's like saying it's human nature, genetic composition comes linked to a person in his or her own right with relationships, a history and set of personal circumstances. Madness isn't meaningless nor does it descend out of a clear blue sky quite randomly, something has to trigger the flux of dopamine and that is sharp distress of some sort, show me someone diagnosed with a psychotic illness and I'll bet money there's a deeply unhappy person there made so by cruelty and hatred from other people. Madness has a function, it shows it does matter if we're horrid to one another this is not an amoral world, our words and deeds are deeply significant and evil ones drive people mad. If you like it is a spiritual barometer registering the evil people do, as unhappiness is, we all have the capacity to be miserably unhappy given certain circumstances so that must be in our genetic makeup as well, see what I mean that catch all explanation is unhelpful and no explanation at all. It's like the bit in CS Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Eustace says in our world a star is a blazing cloud of gas. He is told no, that's what a star is made of not what it is.
Relying on a basic scientific "explanation" to the disregard of everything else would be like telling someone "Your genetic composition causes your person to trigger in me a mating instinct" instead of saying "I love you". I know which would be more likely to get me into bed, science is bloody good stuff for cause and effect and some intriguingly intricate explanations of the natural world, long live science but not to the exclusion of religion, literature and all our feelings. After all, having the explanation of the visible spectrum is fascinating but it doesn't describe the beauty of a rainbow, science enhances the beauty of the planet with understanding of the various lives and functions involved, science can't describe the effect of springtime, all that lovely greenness and buds opening from no human cause. And pretty silly we'd look if springtime failed, to understand it should be to cherish it with humility and gratitude, not to think we own it and it's come about exclusively for our benefit. Religion is blind without science, as Einstein remarked, adding that science would be lame without religion.
When I was mad the psychotherapists I saw told me I'd be cured if I admitted to hating my mother. Now that is bad science and one eyed science, for starters my Dad's behaviour to my dying mother had driven me mad and though my Mum was a tough character to be trusted with the tender care of three daughters she didn't want, I wanted to understand her better and find resolution, not chuck all the blame on her stupidly and misogynistically. I put up resistance to this idea and they started trying to trick me into slagging off my Mum, were they being bad mothers was that why I was angry? Etc etc. At that point I shut up, they weren't listening and were trying to twist my words, which chimed with rather a lot of childhood experience I wanted to understand better, not revert to like a cross two year old and scream and kick on the floor. Reading Charlotte Bronte's Shirley has helped me understand my Mum better, she was very like Mrs Yorke and like the character couldn't help her nature, there are some wonderful portraits from real life in the minor characters in Shirley, I'll leave you with a strong recommendation to get hold of a copy and read it!
Friday 21 May 2010
Reluctance to read new work
May 22nd 2010
I suppose I expected people to read A Town Unlike Alice on my website, www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, because having written it I was in the secret of how compelling I'd made the piece, and I was excited and wanted to share my delight, but given my own feelings of apprehension mingled with shyness when faced with an unknown unseen piece of writing, I should have gauged the feelings of a potential audience and made allowances. I tried to introduce it sexily and interestingly but perhaps that terribly dark threatening word schizophrenia put people off and they thought they were being inveigled into reading ravings or dreary complaints. Let me make clear that A Town Unlike Alice isn't shroud waving, dreary complaints about a nothing life or anything like the victim speaking in all those charity adverts or "serious" items on Breakfast News which made one feel bored, reluctantly dutiful but eager for the bits about the dead donkey to follow, it's fresh, new and exciting with plenty of rage about the way the sick are demonised but not a word of a moan or a dirge! It's not about inadequacy or things never being quite right enough for the poor victim whinge whinge, it's about someone gripped by terror succeeding in living, the kindness that can turn into detestation when the kind person feels competed with and encroached on, yet how the recipient survives detestation and cold shouldering with a small but defiant shout of triumph.
Carillon magazine gave me a very good write up all thanks to them, Fire advertised the website and featured my work, more to follow in the summer issue, several others have been interested in seeing A Town Unlike Alice printed out, not everyone is connected to the Internet, but quite a few people I've approached are interested in me reading their work, but bored to tears and reluctant when it comes the other way round. One is reminded of the student on a Creative Writing Course saying I never read poetry but here's some I've written. Then, working on the same principle, there are nameless - deliberately - editors who reject work if it looks like competition, editors who will cheerfully patronise you if you shuffle abjectly towards them being suitably subservient and will be very helpful, but send you packing if you approach them confidently as an equal, there's a website specially for survivors of mental illness that operates like that. As Thom Yorke sings: "I am not a vegetable/ I will not control my self", that's my anthem and why should I contort myself into false humility and feebly allow "good" to be doled out to me to make the dolers feel great about themselves? I've been through too much and have stood on my own two feet by myself, I have some pride.
Ah, I feel better for that rant! There's the argument that if you have a woman's name people percieve your work more critically and suspiciously, which is far from true about everyone there are some bloody brilliant editors of magazines who are far too generous and intelligent and enthusiastic to let that sway them, just the odd very few make me think that if I was Alastair not Anne I might have met more of a welcome. That's more of a sneaking suspicion on my part than the result of anything overt and as I say, the overwhelming majority either like or dislike my style and it would make no difference to them if I had green tentacles and inhabited a small but comfortable crater on the planet Zarg. So I'll sign out with best wishes, especially to kind and supportive editors who give their time and attention out of the goodness of their hearts and an abiding love of poetry!
I suppose I expected people to read A Town Unlike Alice on my website, www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, because having written it I was in the secret of how compelling I'd made the piece, and I was excited and wanted to share my delight, but given my own feelings of apprehension mingled with shyness when faced with an unknown unseen piece of writing, I should have gauged the feelings of a potential audience and made allowances. I tried to introduce it sexily and interestingly but perhaps that terribly dark threatening word schizophrenia put people off and they thought they were being inveigled into reading ravings or dreary complaints. Let me make clear that A Town Unlike Alice isn't shroud waving, dreary complaints about a nothing life or anything like the victim speaking in all those charity adverts or "serious" items on Breakfast News which made one feel bored, reluctantly dutiful but eager for the bits about the dead donkey to follow, it's fresh, new and exciting with plenty of rage about the way the sick are demonised but not a word of a moan or a dirge! It's not about inadequacy or things never being quite right enough for the poor victim whinge whinge, it's about someone gripped by terror succeeding in living, the kindness that can turn into detestation when the kind person feels competed with and encroached on, yet how the recipient survives detestation and cold shouldering with a small but defiant shout of triumph.
Carillon magazine gave me a very good write up all thanks to them, Fire advertised the website and featured my work, more to follow in the summer issue, several others have been interested in seeing A Town Unlike Alice printed out, not everyone is connected to the Internet, but quite a few people I've approached are interested in me reading their work, but bored to tears and reluctant when it comes the other way round. One is reminded of the student on a Creative Writing Course saying I never read poetry but here's some I've written. Then, working on the same principle, there are nameless - deliberately - editors who reject work if it looks like competition, editors who will cheerfully patronise you if you shuffle abjectly towards them being suitably subservient and will be very helpful, but send you packing if you approach them confidently as an equal, there's a website specially for survivors of mental illness that operates like that. As Thom Yorke sings: "I am not a vegetable/ I will not control my self", that's my anthem and why should I contort myself into false humility and feebly allow "good" to be doled out to me to make the dolers feel great about themselves? I've been through too much and have stood on my own two feet by myself, I have some pride.
Ah, I feel better for that rant! There's the argument that if you have a woman's name people percieve your work more critically and suspiciously, which is far from true about everyone there are some bloody brilliant editors of magazines who are far too generous and intelligent and enthusiastic to let that sway them, just the odd very few make me think that if I was Alastair not Anne I might have met more of a welcome. That's more of a sneaking suspicion on my part than the result of anything overt and as I say, the overwhelming majority either like or dislike my style and it would make no difference to them if I had green tentacles and inhabited a small but comfortable crater on the planet Zarg. So I'll sign out with best wishes, especially to kind and supportive editors who give their time and attention out of the goodness of their hearts and an abiding love of poetry!
Saturday 1 May 2010
May Day
1 5 2010
May Day is mild, grey overhead and green in my garden below, spattered with cherry petals and slowly surging with snails come out to appreciate the wet and eat anything going. You can't beat heavy overnight rain then a calm grey morning after a dry spell when the garden seems to breathe and quivers with raindrops, the vegetable bed dark with rain and compost and speckled with the perilous fluorescent blue of slug pellets to protect the spinach and carrot seedlings from snails and slugs. It's them or my crop, letting slugs and snails browse at their ease is plain bad farming so I control them in places where I want a crop to grow and leave plenty of garden for them to live in. Farming? My father was an agricultural scientist working for the then Ministry of Agriculture, I grew up on a series of different Ministry farms and learned farming by keeping my eyes peeled - terrible phrase that, almost Shakespearean - and playing all over the farms, my Dad had told me how to keep safe from agricultural machinery. Now I grow soft fruit and a few vegetables and have a pond for toads and newts, watching newts surface and sink effortlessly, just a few tiny air bubbles in the clear brown water, is balm to the soul after dodging heavy traffic and pedestrians with trophy fighting dogs going to the shops.
The big Victorian asylums used to have farms where the patients grew food for the hospital, plenty of fresh air and exercise and satisfying labour for poor souls sick in their minds and whatever Foucault might say about margins and madness the asylums were built where there was "good" air and farming land available, you only have to read Jane Austen to understand the health concerns about good fresh air being necessary for fitness. London's expansion was affected by the prevailing westerly winds in the UK, more expensive homes were built to the west where the air was fresh and there were no third class tickets on the trains serving these expensive suburbs, going east where the air was staler and polluted by industry the terraced dwellings for the workforce were built. Later on in the last century the asylum farms fell into disuse, it was popularly thought agricultural labour demeaned the patients and I bet no-one asked them but imposed idleness because they thought, if one can dignify the state of mind as thought, they knew what was best. Now that the asylums have been closed and the surplus grounds and farmland sold to developers the idea of agricultural labour to promote dignity and a healthier frame of mind is coming back into fashion.
Good farming practice is a science and takes you out of yourself, there are all those pests to outwit and control, there are plant nurseries that will cheerfully sell you diseased fruit canes to be found out about the hard way, and there is the soil to maintain with manure and compost and to be cleared of pernicious weeds. You have to pay attention to the weather forecasts so you know whether your fruit flowers will be frosted if you don't wrap them in cloth overnight, whether or not you need to irrigate, my father would walk outside every evening to study the sky and cloud formations for indications of what weather to expect the next day therefore whether they could plough, or harvest, or lift potatoes and so on. It gets my goat when weather forecasters simper and apologise if they expect rain, one, they don't cause the weather, two, what about the farmers they do grow our food, three, why simplify to the point of absurdity when weather is fascinating and would interest lots of people if intelligently explained? The stallholders in the market always listen to the farming programmes on the radio, the weather forecasts are intelligent and what goes on on farms will affect the prices and availability of the produce they sell, it's sound business sense. If their spelling is anything to go by they're not highly educated in the formal sense, they are intelligent people earning a living by using their brains. I'll leave you with a brilliant bit of banter I heard shouted by a stallholder, "Five pounds of bananas for a pound, eat here or take away!" Best wishes, Anne Rees.
May Day is mild, grey overhead and green in my garden below, spattered with cherry petals and slowly surging with snails come out to appreciate the wet and eat anything going. You can't beat heavy overnight rain then a calm grey morning after a dry spell when the garden seems to breathe and quivers with raindrops, the vegetable bed dark with rain and compost and speckled with the perilous fluorescent blue of slug pellets to protect the spinach and carrot seedlings from snails and slugs. It's them or my crop, letting slugs and snails browse at their ease is plain bad farming so I control them in places where I want a crop to grow and leave plenty of garden for them to live in. Farming? My father was an agricultural scientist working for the then Ministry of Agriculture, I grew up on a series of different Ministry farms and learned farming by keeping my eyes peeled - terrible phrase that, almost Shakespearean - and playing all over the farms, my Dad had told me how to keep safe from agricultural machinery. Now I grow soft fruit and a few vegetables and have a pond for toads and newts, watching newts surface and sink effortlessly, just a few tiny air bubbles in the clear brown water, is balm to the soul after dodging heavy traffic and pedestrians with trophy fighting dogs going to the shops.
The big Victorian asylums used to have farms where the patients grew food for the hospital, plenty of fresh air and exercise and satisfying labour for poor souls sick in their minds and whatever Foucault might say about margins and madness the asylums were built where there was "good" air and farming land available, you only have to read Jane Austen to understand the health concerns about good fresh air being necessary for fitness. London's expansion was affected by the prevailing westerly winds in the UK, more expensive homes were built to the west where the air was fresh and there were no third class tickets on the trains serving these expensive suburbs, going east where the air was staler and polluted by industry the terraced dwellings for the workforce were built. Later on in the last century the asylum farms fell into disuse, it was popularly thought agricultural labour demeaned the patients and I bet no-one asked them but imposed idleness because they thought, if one can dignify the state of mind as thought, they knew what was best. Now that the asylums have been closed and the surplus grounds and farmland sold to developers the idea of agricultural labour to promote dignity and a healthier frame of mind is coming back into fashion.
Good farming practice is a science and takes you out of yourself, there are all those pests to outwit and control, there are plant nurseries that will cheerfully sell you diseased fruit canes to be found out about the hard way, and there is the soil to maintain with manure and compost and to be cleared of pernicious weeds. You have to pay attention to the weather forecasts so you know whether your fruit flowers will be frosted if you don't wrap them in cloth overnight, whether or not you need to irrigate, my father would walk outside every evening to study the sky and cloud formations for indications of what weather to expect the next day therefore whether they could plough, or harvest, or lift potatoes and so on. It gets my goat when weather forecasters simper and apologise if they expect rain, one, they don't cause the weather, two, what about the farmers they do grow our food, three, why simplify to the point of absurdity when weather is fascinating and would interest lots of people if intelligently explained? The stallholders in the market always listen to the farming programmes on the radio, the weather forecasts are intelligent and what goes on on farms will affect the prices and availability of the produce they sell, it's sound business sense. If their spelling is anything to go by they're not highly educated in the formal sense, they are intelligent people earning a living by using their brains. I'll leave you with a brilliant bit of banter I heard shouted by a stallholder, "Five pounds of bananas for a pound, eat here or take away!" Best wishes, Anne Rees.
Thursday 22 April 2010
The language is metaphorical
22 4 2010
This is purely a train of thought but it's almost impossible to say things in so many plain words, or put things literally, without a metaphorical superstructure that is inherent in the way we use language to put things, you can't combine a verb and a noun without a dramatic nuance and tone of voice beginning to make itself manifest. Like the over used - in cookery programmes certainly - word literally, it conveys a dramatic and metaphorical flavour because of its having been used and how often and how affectedly, it's been dramatically coloured by its use and come to be understood in such and such a way. I think we perceive words in terms of picture, texture and flavour in the act of reading a sentence or line of poetry, we sympathetically appreciate good and pictorial use of words, and use of the textures and flavours of words through tricks like assonance, alliteration and rhyme and half rhyme, all the rhythmic echoes in repeated consonants and vowels. There's a playfulness and delight in the way a child will try out new words and spot familiarities in similar sounding words that is the essence of appreciation and humour, adults play too you only have to tune in to pub conversations among the regulars to be listening to word play and humour.
The experience of hearing Voices is of course hearing verbal taunts, always on the rawest of raw spots because you yourself know your rawest spots, hearing Voices is involuntary and deeply distressing, a refinement of self loathing and torture as a way of rationalising, pitifully, dreadful things that have happened. The sanest among us can't help trying to rationalise irrational things we do love to make sense, we humans, and will search and search for a way of making intelligible things or people beyond our control so we can settle our minds satisfactorily. Blaming ourselves is one short cut to making sense and how the brain craves for sense! Look at one's own experience of unhappy love affairs, it ends in tears and we want to talk and talk to make sense of why everything went pear shaped when we had the best intentions, to excuse ourselves whilst desperately trying to make it not have happened, to make things come right in the way we desperately dream of as ideal. Show me a psychiatric patient and I'll show you someone who's had a terrible time, trying to make sense and the sense making process getting out of hand, I call it total internal introspection, you end up swallowed into yourself at which point you need help in your deep and inescapable distress before you damage yourself in sheer effing despair because alone you can't make things come right and yourself better. Psychiatric patients in a safe place like a hospital enjoy jokes and word plays in a small community where they're encouraged to chat to each other and the nurses and it's the small community that begins the healing process with the verbal interplay. As humans we're designed to be sociable and work things out among ourselves, psychiatric patients are no different.
The absurdities in common verbal usage are a rich source of humour for people like the late Spike Milligan - the curtains were drawn but the rest of the room was real - we used to roll in the aisles when Milligan's programmes came on the ward TV and lots of our humour was sub Milligan. The day Peter who was confined to hospital dressing gown and pyjamas escaped and went for a long walk produced lots of humour, his wry admission that he'd got as far as Snaresbrook made the place name ineffably funny, the more so because Peter rarely spoke, Peter sat there with a little smile on his face because he was the hero of the ward that night. Same as living in a small village, anything out of the ordinary makes the gossip grape vine. I've gone from the language being inherently metaphorical to psychiatry as usual, my intention was to indicate the similarities not sensationalise the differences. Today my husband gave help to a traffic victim, she'd been riding on her bike past the 6th Form |College where he works and a driver had cut her up and knocked her over. She'd yelled abuse after the car he was in so he stopped, got out, picked her up by the throat and hurled her into the open road. Now that driver was sane, he saw that as a legitimate reaction to a mouthy cyclist, you tell me if the mad are the biggest threat to your wellbeing?
Best wishes I'm too cross to speak any more, Anne Rees
This is purely a train of thought but it's almost impossible to say things in so many plain words, or put things literally, without a metaphorical superstructure that is inherent in the way we use language to put things, you can't combine a verb and a noun without a dramatic nuance and tone of voice beginning to make itself manifest. Like the over used - in cookery programmes certainly - word literally, it conveys a dramatic and metaphorical flavour because of its having been used and how often and how affectedly, it's been dramatically coloured by its use and come to be understood in such and such a way. I think we perceive words in terms of picture, texture and flavour in the act of reading a sentence or line of poetry, we sympathetically appreciate good and pictorial use of words, and use of the textures and flavours of words through tricks like assonance, alliteration and rhyme and half rhyme, all the rhythmic echoes in repeated consonants and vowels. There's a playfulness and delight in the way a child will try out new words and spot familiarities in similar sounding words that is the essence of appreciation and humour, adults play too you only have to tune in to pub conversations among the regulars to be listening to word play and humour.
The experience of hearing Voices is of course hearing verbal taunts, always on the rawest of raw spots because you yourself know your rawest spots, hearing Voices is involuntary and deeply distressing, a refinement of self loathing and torture as a way of rationalising, pitifully, dreadful things that have happened. The sanest among us can't help trying to rationalise irrational things we do love to make sense, we humans, and will search and search for a way of making intelligible things or people beyond our control so we can settle our minds satisfactorily. Blaming ourselves is one short cut to making sense and how the brain craves for sense! Look at one's own experience of unhappy love affairs, it ends in tears and we want to talk and talk to make sense of why everything went pear shaped when we had the best intentions, to excuse ourselves whilst desperately trying to make it not have happened, to make things come right in the way we desperately dream of as ideal. Show me a psychiatric patient and I'll show you someone who's had a terrible time, trying to make sense and the sense making process getting out of hand, I call it total internal introspection, you end up swallowed into yourself at which point you need help in your deep and inescapable distress before you damage yourself in sheer effing despair because alone you can't make things come right and yourself better. Psychiatric patients in a safe place like a hospital enjoy jokes and word plays in a small community where they're encouraged to chat to each other and the nurses and it's the small community that begins the healing process with the verbal interplay. As humans we're designed to be sociable and work things out among ourselves, psychiatric patients are no different.
The absurdities in common verbal usage are a rich source of humour for people like the late Spike Milligan - the curtains were drawn but the rest of the room was real - we used to roll in the aisles when Milligan's programmes came on the ward TV and lots of our humour was sub Milligan. The day Peter who was confined to hospital dressing gown and pyjamas escaped and went for a long walk produced lots of humour, his wry admission that he'd got as far as Snaresbrook made the place name ineffably funny, the more so because Peter rarely spoke, Peter sat there with a little smile on his face because he was the hero of the ward that night. Same as living in a small village, anything out of the ordinary makes the gossip grape vine. I've gone from the language being inherently metaphorical to psychiatry as usual, my intention was to indicate the similarities not sensationalise the differences. Today my husband gave help to a traffic victim, she'd been riding on her bike past the 6th Form |College where he works and a driver had cut her up and knocked her over. She'd yelled abuse after the car he was in so he stopped, got out, picked her up by the throat and hurled her into the open road. Now that driver was sane, he saw that as a legitimate reaction to a mouthy cyclist, you tell me if the mad are the biggest threat to your wellbeing?
Best wishes I'm too cross to speak any more, Anne Rees
Wednesday 31 March 2010
More links and poems accepted
31 3 2010
I have Awen and Carillon magazines to thank for accepting three and two poems respectively, and Global Tapestry Journal, Fire and Quantum Leap to thank for their interest in seeing print outs of the website contents, computers crash, isolated parts of the Uk can't be readily linked to the Internet and some editors just like being independent. I'm obliging when it comes to print outs, no use hiding my light under a bushel after all it's readers I'm interested in, anyone interested in poetry and finding out about schizophrenia is a friend of mine and the people one is surrounded with by the accident of geography aren't necessarily interested in either in fact would run a mile if threatened with a dog eared manuscript, as they always seem to expect themselves to be whether or not I've ever advanced with flashing eyes and an armful of closely written leaves of paper! The way the imagination supplies vivid and frightening images where something unexpected but unknown crops up is fascinating, I suppose it's the old fight or flight reflex, expect the worst of that rustle in the bushes at night when you're by yourself, but the wariness in people's faces when I say I write is quite daunting enough, let alone offering more information about an illness every thriller writer published has taught them to expect a sadistic serial killer of in a sufferer. I saw the same when my daughters were at university faced with a text to read, I used to say pretend it's someone really nice who is going to tell you intriguing things, just to get them into the right frame of mind to approach the new text with anything like an open mind. That's the key, we never approach something unknown with open minds we are busily worrying about just what threat it represents and calculating how soon we'll have to sprint in the direction of away and are armed with knee jerk reactions where we've been taught to fear.
That's general, what John Wymondham's Chrysalids would call behind thinks, what I do dislike and disdain is the not in my nice world attitude I've met with people I went to school with on Friends Reunited. Spot of frankness and honesty? Write that so called friend goodbye, lots of the people I'm surrounded with by accident of geography have that same attitude, oh we're not like that and if I happen to be like that in despite I'm fearfully isolated because you don't invite your local friendly schizophrenic to go shopping or meet for a coffee or a beer, you want to relax. Why you still can't relax is beyond me but I loom large in the imagination as the vividest of threats and as someone you have to gird your loins to encounter, apparently shopping and stopping for a beer are things I'm not supposed to want to do, nor to get in touch with past schoolfellows.
One curious bonus, and it is a bonus however tasking it may turn out to be, is that people assume because schizophrenia is serious, I'm the right person to contact when things go pear shaped, like a parent dying or a mortal illness being diagnosed. people I thought have no time for me have contacted me when the very serious if not mortal threatens and I've done my best to rise to the challenge and be a staunch friend and comrade. I buried a lady who had become my best friend by virtue of letters exchanged as she fought cancer, back in October last year, when Sadie knew how desperately ill she was all my weirdness was no longer weirdness but a courageous point of view maintained in the teeth of dreadful possibilities, all the dreadful possibilities I might seem to represent were become her familiars and she wanted my friendship and mediation. We exchanged every confidence we could and I wrote every week until Sadie's death, just silly things and exciting things I noticed around the borough and it's both silly, sordid, brave and exciting enough. People will tell me things when driven hard enough, it almost seems they think they've descended to my level, but they look to me to negotiate that level and their trust reminds me of the trust we enjoyed between ourselves in psychiatric hospital, that's something real I can understand and respond to gladly. Mental maps are funny things, everything that most puts people off in my diagnosis most draws them to me in time of great need, despite the best efforts of thriller writers ands the media or even perhaps because of them, when the direst things are immediate possibilities you want someone you assume is already used to it!
Best wishes, Anne Rees.
I have Awen and Carillon magazines to thank for accepting three and two poems respectively, and Global Tapestry Journal, Fire and Quantum Leap to thank for their interest in seeing print outs of the website contents, computers crash, isolated parts of the Uk can't be readily linked to the Internet and some editors just like being independent. I'm obliging when it comes to print outs, no use hiding my light under a bushel after all it's readers I'm interested in, anyone interested in poetry and finding out about schizophrenia is a friend of mine and the people one is surrounded with by the accident of geography aren't necessarily interested in either in fact would run a mile if threatened with a dog eared manuscript, as they always seem to expect themselves to be whether or not I've ever advanced with flashing eyes and an armful of closely written leaves of paper! The way the imagination supplies vivid and frightening images where something unexpected but unknown crops up is fascinating, I suppose it's the old fight or flight reflex, expect the worst of that rustle in the bushes at night when you're by yourself, but the wariness in people's faces when I say I write is quite daunting enough, let alone offering more information about an illness every thriller writer published has taught them to expect a sadistic serial killer of in a sufferer. I saw the same when my daughters were at university faced with a text to read, I used to say pretend it's someone really nice who is going to tell you intriguing things, just to get them into the right frame of mind to approach the new text with anything like an open mind. That's the key, we never approach something unknown with open minds we are busily worrying about just what threat it represents and calculating how soon we'll have to sprint in the direction of away and are armed with knee jerk reactions where we've been taught to fear.
That's general, what John Wymondham's Chrysalids would call behind thinks, what I do dislike and disdain is the not in my nice world attitude I've met with people I went to school with on Friends Reunited. Spot of frankness and honesty? Write that so called friend goodbye, lots of the people I'm surrounded with by accident of geography have that same attitude, oh we're not like that and if I happen to be like that in despite I'm fearfully isolated because you don't invite your local friendly schizophrenic to go shopping or meet for a coffee or a beer, you want to relax. Why you still can't relax is beyond me but I loom large in the imagination as the vividest of threats and as someone you have to gird your loins to encounter, apparently shopping and stopping for a beer are things I'm not supposed to want to do, nor to get in touch with past schoolfellows.
One curious bonus, and it is a bonus however tasking it may turn out to be, is that people assume because schizophrenia is serious, I'm the right person to contact when things go pear shaped, like a parent dying or a mortal illness being diagnosed. people I thought have no time for me have contacted me when the very serious if not mortal threatens and I've done my best to rise to the challenge and be a staunch friend and comrade. I buried a lady who had become my best friend by virtue of letters exchanged as she fought cancer, back in October last year, when Sadie knew how desperately ill she was all my weirdness was no longer weirdness but a courageous point of view maintained in the teeth of dreadful possibilities, all the dreadful possibilities I might seem to represent were become her familiars and she wanted my friendship and mediation. We exchanged every confidence we could and I wrote every week until Sadie's death, just silly things and exciting things I noticed around the borough and it's both silly, sordid, brave and exciting enough. People will tell me things when driven hard enough, it almost seems they think they've descended to my level, but they look to me to negotiate that level and their trust reminds me of the trust we enjoyed between ourselves in psychiatric hospital, that's something real I can understand and respond to gladly. Mental maps are funny things, everything that most puts people off in my diagnosis most draws them to me in time of great need, despite the best efforts of thriller writers ands the media or even perhaps because of them, when the direst things are immediate possibilities you want someone you assume is already used to it!
Best wishes, Anne Rees.
Thursday 18 March 2010
ANNE'S BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
18 3 2010
Beyond the bedroom windows were rooftops strung with wires
purple cloud-maps buoyed up in a hot pink radiance,
in the living room below me were my family,
noises boiling up the stairs, the sunset
behind the roofs and wires was vividly immediate.
I stared at it I held the madness in
with a terrible effort, I exercised iron self control
my brain was a total internally introspective thing,
I didn't some and I was silent, staring.
If my absorption broke I'd burst in smithereens
spout dreadful gouts of stinking blood I would go horribly mad.
The locum doctor disapproved of my self diagnosis,
was frozen faced at my frightened tears. I told her what the matter was,
she squatted on the hospital admission I needed like a toad
cold, wet-skinned and unmoved, blinking, watchful of my weaknesss
her power made her hostile, she was determined not to yield an inch.
What friend could I tell? The media makes madness terrifyingly sensational
with a fiery Gothic winged mythology, it sells papers, sells TV.
It didn't scare the doctor who finally admitted me, he was compassionate,
he telephoned and urged, and overcame, the dilatory,
had grasped it was an emergency and he secured help for me:
still thrillers, TV and Hollywood accuse the mad of unspeakable crimes,
the wicked get rich and flourish like the green bay tree.
Beyond the bedroom windows were rooftops strung with wires
purple cloud-maps buoyed up in a hot pink radiance,
in the living room below me were my family,
noises boiling up the stairs, the sunset
behind the roofs and wires was vividly immediate.
I stared at it I held the madness in
with a terrible effort, I exercised iron self control
my brain was a total internally introspective thing,
I didn't some and I was silent, staring.
If my absorption broke I'd burst in smithereens
spout dreadful gouts of stinking blood I would go horribly mad.
The locum doctor disapproved of my self diagnosis,
was frozen faced at my frightened tears. I told her what the matter was,
she squatted on the hospital admission I needed like a toad
cold, wet-skinned and unmoved, blinking, watchful of my weaknesss
her power made her hostile, she was determined not to yield an inch.
What friend could I tell? The media makes madness terrifyingly sensational
with a fiery Gothic winged mythology, it sells papers, sells TV.
It didn't scare the doctor who finally admitted me, he was compassionate,
he telephoned and urged, and overcame, the dilatory,
had grasped it was an emergency and he secured help for me:
still thrillers, TV and Hollywood accuse the mad of unspeakable crimes,
the wicked get rich and flourish like the green bay tree.
Tuesday 16 February 2010
Nobody to whom to talk let's keep grammatical!
16 2 2010
It's a lonely life when all but one of your family refuse to talk about ideas though love airing their opinions and correct you on the basis of less information than you've had when venturing an idea, a little knowledge rather supporting the ill informed opinion than opening the mind to listening and acquiring more. What the hell it's like this for lots of people I'm not whingeing, well not much, don't we all thirst for intelligent conversation and appreciation of our ideas? Thomas Traherne says that illimitable desire for communication with others is evidence of our immortal souls, we are Godlike in our desires and craving for understanding, our appreciation of others who can converse on an equal basis, each one of us is born to inherit the earth which is why we appreciate one another so much and crave for talk and show kindness and kindliness towards one another, seeking to elicit that precious response. Traherne says in looking at nature and outwards to the stars we are on the first steps of the Kingdom of Heaven, he rejoices in the thought of worlds out there populated by sentient creatures, caused to come into being by God so they could come to know Him, not bad for a seventeenth century cleric in a retired parish near Hereford!
I like Traherne, he kept in touch with other thinkers of his day and denounced contentment, why be pleased to settle into a narrow rut without intellectual stimulation when you only have to look at the intense tender blue of the spring sky, the budding trees and singing birds, to know in advance of the power and the glory and to long to speak of the fullness of ideas in your heart? Traherne knew of telescopes and microscopes and the infinities of worlds they revealed both macro and micro, fitting studies for infinite minds like ours he said, I wish militant atheists like Dawkins would read a little and learn a little about the religion they denigrate, refutation by denigration always seeming a very poor way of arguing to me. Dawkins would be the first to claim he has an infinite mind, the authority therefor might stick in his throat but as he doesn't even know what he's talking about he's safe from that one. I don't like messy vituperation nor do I like the mythologising of science, if you believe the narrative all scientists work for the love of knowledge, not so says Patricia Farah, a scientist herself and Cambridge don, science has always been funded for the hardware and or prestige to be acquired, both commercial interests, this Great Man working in isolation towards the goal of Knowledge is just a myth, it annoys me too it has to be a Great Man, what about Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell, discoverers of the structure of DNA and of Pulsars, respectively?
I wouldn't be a critical thinker unless I noticed how the narratives can be skewed, my tutor at Oxford Elizabeth Mackenzie would expect no less, she had this intimidating habit of whipping her specs off and demolishing one with half a dozen other authorities, with a background of horrid crunches on bone, her Persian Wolfhound spent our tutorials behind the settee demolishing bones from the butcher. It was a sort of counterpoint, Dilys my tutorial partner and |I would crawl out into the fresh air feeling chewed, Dilys would go for caffeine and cakes, I'd go for caffeine and nicotine and we'd talk and talk, usually with me going for a debunk and timid Dilys being surprised and startled by my daring. That was only because Dilys was upper middle class and shy of authority, and I was a bolshie bastard nurtured by listening to self educated miners argue, and very well, in the pit village where my parents lived.
I've ben reading my back numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, the TLS dismisses Dawkins as trespassing off his own patch by finding himself incapable of talking about religion in scientific terms, he has to fall back on abuse. The TLS is quite clear, they are clean different narratives and can't be talked about in the same terms, and Dawkins is largely ignorant of what he abuses so vehemently. Let's hear it for Tranherne who loved the natural world, there are massive amounts of reverence for nature in the major and minor religions, why can't we learn then moblise all religions in the fight against global warming and irreparable damage to the planet?I love the natural world myself, I see we can farm it but must stop before we harm it. The days are getting longer, there's a sweet smell in the air, best wishes.
Anne Rees
It's a lonely life when all but one of your family refuse to talk about ideas though love airing their opinions and correct you on the basis of less information than you've had when venturing an idea, a little knowledge rather supporting the ill informed opinion than opening the mind to listening and acquiring more. What the hell it's like this for lots of people I'm not whingeing, well not much, don't we all thirst for intelligent conversation and appreciation of our ideas? Thomas Traherne says that illimitable desire for communication with others is evidence of our immortal souls, we are Godlike in our desires and craving for understanding, our appreciation of others who can converse on an equal basis, each one of us is born to inherit the earth which is why we appreciate one another so much and crave for talk and show kindness and kindliness towards one another, seeking to elicit that precious response. Traherne says in looking at nature and outwards to the stars we are on the first steps of the Kingdom of Heaven, he rejoices in the thought of worlds out there populated by sentient creatures, caused to come into being by God so they could come to know Him, not bad for a seventeenth century cleric in a retired parish near Hereford!
I like Traherne, he kept in touch with other thinkers of his day and denounced contentment, why be pleased to settle into a narrow rut without intellectual stimulation when you only have to look at the intense tender blue of the spring sky, the budding trees and singing birds, to know in advance of the power and the glory and to long to speak of the fullness of ideas in your heart? Traherne knew of telescopes and microscopes and the infinities of worlds they revealed both macro and micro, fitting studies for infinite minds like ours he said, I wish militant atheists like Dawkins would read a little and learn a little about the religion they denigrate, refutation by denigration always seeming a very poor way of arguing to me. Dawkins would be the first to claim he has an infinite mind, the authority therefor might stick in his throat but as he doesn't even know what he's talking about he's safe from that one. I don't like messy vituperation nor do I like the mythologising of science, if you believe the narrative all scientists work for the love of knowledge, not so says Patricia Farah, a scientist herself and Cambridge don, science has always been funded for the hardware and or prestige to be acquired, both commercial interests, this Great Man working in isolation towards the goal of Knowledge is just a myth, it annoys me too it has to be a Great Man, what about Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell, discoverers of the structure of DNA and of Pulsars, respectively?
I wouldn't be a critical thinker unless I noticed how the narratives can be skewed, my tutor at Oxford Elizabeth Mackenzie would expect no less, she had this intimidating habit of whipping her specs off and demolishing one with half a dozen other authorities, with a background of horrid crunches on bone, her Persian Wolfhound spent our tutorials behind the settee demolishing bones from the butcher. It was a sort of counterpoint, Dilys my tutorial partner and |I would crawl out into the fresh air feeling chewed, Dilys would go for caffeine and cakes, I'd go for caffeine and nicotine and we'd talk and talk, usually with me going for a debunk and timid Dilys being surprised and startled by my daring. That was only because Dilys was upper middle class and shy of authority, and I was a bolshie bastard nurtured by listening to self educated miners argue, and very well, in the pit village where my parents lived.
I've ben reading my back numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, the TLS dismisses Dawkins as trespassing off his own patch by finding himself incapable of talking about religion in scientific terms, he has to fall back on abuse. The TLS is quite clear, they are clean different narratives and can't be talked about in the same terms, and Dawkins is largely ignorant of what he abuses so vehemently. Let's hear it for Tranherne who loved the natural world, there are massive amounts of reverence for nature in the major and minor religions, why can't we learn then moblise all religions in the fight against global warming and irreparable damage to the planet?I love the natural world myself, I see we can farm it but must stop before we harm it. The days are getting longer, there's a sweet smell in the air, best wishes.
Anne Rees
Saturday 30 January 2010
poem accepted
30 1 2010
Decanto magazine has accepted one of the poems I sent out to advertise A Town Unlike Alice and Lisa Stewart who edits Decanto will try to add a link from the magazine website to mine, and Jeremy Hilton editor of Fire magazine has promised to mention Town Unlike in his next editorial, that issue of Fire will be featuring mental health issues. It will appear later in the spring, with two of my poems in it and Jeremy says he'll publish a third poem as well to raise my profile, very sweet and generous of him writers would be nowhere without the dedication and investment of time and taste of so many editors like Jeremy and Lisa. Cannon's Mouth and Carillon have also promised links but should you think me getting swollen headed, Acumen rejected my work with a form letter which brought me back to earth with a jolt! You can only please some of the people some of the time, there are as many ideas about what makes poetry as there are editors.
So far Sam and I haven't had the chance of getting out to take photos for Town Unlike, either the weather is appalling or he's busy and I can't ask him to venture outside with his expensive camera when it's pouring with rain, nor dare I ask him to grovel in the mud when there's a sharp frost or snow is on the ground, a meat and potato pie will only buy some favours. I'll see what the weather's like as February proceeds, perhaps next Sunday, Saturday is out because of the Six Nations rugby match, Wales are playing England and my husband is Welsh, the Wales England matches bring out the worst of his racism and if Wales win he'd better not crow too loudly, Sam supports England and may not feel like doing the Rees family any favours if he's been as humiliated as his team. The Welsh feel as strongly as anyone of Pakistani origin when their team plays England, folk memories of conquest and oppression are vividly alive and translated into national rivalries in sport, rugby is a working class game in Wales whereas the England team are usually drawn from the better off classes, it makes for lots of partisan spirit.
My husband may not know much Welsh but he recalls every insult to the "Sais", the English, and they are many and vigorously expressed.
I'm tired and I'm not very happy, I've bust a gut revising poems and it's very concentrated hard work and takes it out of one. This morning the ground was covered in snow and the air was icy when I went out to the cashpoint, my sacks of manure are frozen so it'd be difficult spreading the contents on my raspberry beds, warmer weather would have made it easier and getting out into the garden would have been the sort of change that is as good as a rest. Still, if I've given those poems my best shot I might have some more acceptances, I'd rather do good work and knacker myself than fiddle about half heartedly then make excuses to myself, it's the work that counts. On that note I'll conclude, I don't intend to make a living out of self pity, as his teacher apocryphally said, you'll never get anywhere by whining Zimmerman! Am I in the wrong job?
Decanto magazine has accepted one of the poems I sent out to advertise A Town Unlike Alice and Lisa Stewart who edits Decanto will try to add a link from the magazine website to mine, and Jeremy Hilton editor of Fire magazine has promised to mention Town Unlike in his next editorial, that issue of Fire will be featuring mental health issues. It will appear later in the spring, with two of my poems in it and Jeremy says he'll publish a third poem as well to raise my profile, very sweet and generous of him writers would be nowhere without the dedication and investment of time and taste of so many editors like Jeremy and Lisa. Cannon's Mouth and Carillon have also promised links but should you think me getting swollen headed, Acumen rejected my work with a form letter which brought me back to earth with a jolt! You can only please some of the people some of the time, there are as many ideas about what makes poetry as there are editors.
So far Sam and I haven't had the chance of getting out to take photos for Town Unlike, either the weather is appalling or he's busy and I can't ask him to venture outside with his expensive camera when it's pouring with rain, nor dare I ask him to grovel in the mud when there's a sharp frost or snow is on the ground, a meat and potato pie will only buy some favours. I'll see what the weather's like as February proceeds, perhaps next Sunday, Saturday is out because of the Six Nations rugby match, Wales are playing England and my husband is Welsh, the Wales England matches bring out the worst of his racism and if Wales win he'd better not crow too loudly, Sam supports England and may not feel like doing the Rees family any favours if he's been as humiliated as his team. The Welsh feel as strongly as anyone of Pakistani origin when their team plays England, folk memories of conquest and oppression are vividly alive and translated into national rivalries in sport, rugby is a working class game in Wales whereas the England team are usually drawn from the better off classes, it makes for lots of partisan spirit.
My husband may not know much Welsh but he recalls every insult to the "Sais", the English, and they are many and vigorously expressed.
I'm tired and I'm not very happy, I've bust a gut revising poems and it's very concentrated hard work and takes it out of one. This morning the ground was covered in snow and the air was icy when I went out to the cashpoint, my sacks of manure are frozen so it'd be difficult spreading the contents on my raspberry beds, warmer weather would have made it easier and getting out into the garden would have been the sort of change that is as good as a rest. Still, if I've given those poems my best shot I might have some more acceptances, I'd rather do good work and knacker myself than fiddle about half heartedly then make excuses to myself, it's the work that counts. On that note I'll conclude, I don't intend to make a living out of self pity, as his teacher apocryphally said, you'll never get anywhere by whining Zimmerman! Am I in the wrong job?
Saturday 23 January 2010
Photos for A Town Unlike Alice
23 1 2010
I've secured my photographer by cooking him meat and potato pie - a northern speciality - and leaning on my daughter Kitty his girlfriend, Sam is buying a super new camera and we're going to prowl round the borough with me pointing out wildflowers, graffiti, traffic intersections, trees and wild birds, and he'll take professional quality photos, that's the theory. Wildflowers in late January early February? Red dead nettle, chickweed and speedwell come to mind, and alder trees with male and female flowers scattering auburn scales over the asphalt pavements, all there if you know what to look for and we have marshes close by with ducks, cormorants, geese, moorhens, coots and reed warblers and wagtails, sometimes I see a heron flapping great wings lazily above the rooftops. It's a country childhood thing, I grew up on farms in the Fens and north Nottinghamshire, my Dad was an agricultural scientist working for what was then the Ministry of Agriculture and both my parents taught me to identify different wild flowers, trees, birds and other wildlife, if you're observant and can put a name to what you see the habit of observation is rewarded andf intensified. Sam can take a superb shot of a wild flower but he has no idea how to identify it so he misses things I'd notice, he's going to find himself crouching in the mud when I find red dead nettle or others, they aren't spectacular they are modest, little and low. But to compensate, this borough is rich in trees both inherited from the original farmland like black poplars, planted by farmers to mark the boundaries of farm and marsh, planted by the council like whitebeam, cherries, alders and both birch and silver birch, and self seeding like scruffy clumps of sycamore and buddleia. Sam can stand tall and direct his camera heavenwards when he takes shots of the trees and winter is a good time, trees stand revealed with their scaffolding bare to the weather and the shapes are characteristic, beautiful cantilevered structures.
As the T-shirt Kitty bought me proudly proclaims, never underestimate the power of a sick mind! I wear it as a statement of fact, my mind may have had its ups and downs but that in no way affects its power to think and observe, nor does it diminish knowledge acquired in childhood and the delight that natural things bring. Even when I was in hospital trying to starve the evil out of myself I loved walking in the grounds and woods, charms of goldfinches used to feed and fly in the woodland borders, magpies used to fly in ones which I thought very mean of them, at times I was quite unhappy enough without having one for sorrow forced on my notice, there were yellowhammers, assorted tits, chaffinches and hawks overhead keeping their eyes peeled for the next meal. keeping one's eyes peeled always struck me as an extraordinarily violent way of putting it!
Sam will get credits all over the website for his photos, as he'd doubtless bitterly remark, there's no such thing as a free lunch but after he's grovelled in the mud for me I'll make sure there's a nice meal as a reward, and go round the shop for some real ales for him. Lots of his photography can be found on flickr, he calls himself Samwise, he regularly sells work to magazines and newspapers. Trading favours is part of the culture in this neck of the woods, as it is all over the world, not what you know but who you know if you want a job done or can offer to do a job. You can't put a price on goodwill backed by expertise or access to a man with whatever at wholesale costs, or something left over from a previous job, or the plumber you know from round the pub turning out on a Bank holiday and not charging Bank holiday rates to fix that spouting pipe. I've met some real gentlemen who regard me as one of us not one of them because we use the same pub, gentlemen careful not to use abuse about nutters and careful not to frighten me with the harsher sorts of pub banter when I'm not well, far kinder to me than some of my graduate acquaintances who use abuse constantly and will apply my diagnosis to insult people they don't like. Curious. They'd slit their wrists rather than use racist abuse and quite rightly so, they're blind when it comes to abusing the most vulnerable members of the community, and sneer at cockney culture and comparatively less well educated people, what they don't realise is that it makes wonderful copy! As I say, never underestimate the power of a sick mind ho ho.
Anne Rees
I've secured my photographer by cooking him meat and potato pie - a northern speciality - and leaning on my daughter Kitty his girlfriend, Sam is buying a super new camera and we're going to prowl round the borough with me pointing out wildflowers, graffiti, traffic intersections, trees and wild birds, and he'll take professional quality photos, that's the theory. Wildflowers in late January early February? Red dead nettle, chickweed and speedwell come to mind, and alder trees with male and female flowers scattering auburn scales over the asphalt pavements, all there if you know what to look for and we have marshes close by with ducks, cormorants, geese, moorhens, coots and reed warblers and wagtails, sometimes I see a heron flapping great wings lazily above the rooftops. It's a country childhood thing, I grew up on farms in the Fens and north Nottinghamshire, my Dad was an agricultural scientist working for what was then the Ministry of Agriculture and both my parents taught me to identify different wild flowers, trees, birds and other wildlife, if you're observant and can put a name to what you see the habit of observation is rewarded andf intensified. Sam can take a superb shot of a wild flower but he has no idea how to identify it so he misses things I'd notice, he's going to find himself crouching in the mud when I find red dead nettle or others, they aren't spectacular they are modest, little and low. But to compensate, this borough is rich in trees both inherited from the original farmland like black poplars, planted by farmers to mark the boundaries of farm and marsh, planted by the council like whitebeam, cherries, alders and both birch and silver birch, and self seeding like scruffy clumps of sycamore and buddleia. Sam can stand tall and direct his camera heavenwards when he takes shots of the trees and winter is a good time, trees stand revealed with their scaffolding bare to the weather and the shapes are characteristic, beautiful cantilevered structures.
As the T-shirt Kitty bought me proudly proclaims, never underestimate the power of a sick mind! I wear it as a statement of fact, my mind may have had its ups and downs but that in no way affects its power to think and observe, nor does it diminish knowledge acquired in childhood and the delight that natural things bring. Even when I was in hospital trying to starve the evil out of myself I loved walking in the grounds and woods, charms of goldfinches used to feed and fly in the woodland borders, magpies used to fly in ones which I thought very mean of them, at times I was quite unhappy enough without having one for sorrow forced on my notice, there were yellowhammers, assorted tits, chaffinches and hawks overhead keeping their eyes peeled for the next meal. keeping one's eyes peeled always struck me as an extraordinarily violent way of putting it!
Sam will get credits all over the website for his photos, as he'd doubtless bitterly remark, there's no such thing as a free lunch but after he's grovelled in the mud for me I'll make sure there's a nice meal as a reward, and go round the shop for some real ales for him. Lots of his photography can be found on flickr, he calls himself Samwise, he regularly sells work to magazines and newspapers. Trading favours is part of the culture in this neck of the woods, as it is all over the world, not what you know but who you know if you want a job done or can offer to do a job. You can't put a price on goodwill backed by expertise or access to a man with whatever at wholesale costs, or something left over from a previous job, or the plumber you know from round the pub turning out on a Bank holiday and not charging Bank holiday rates to fix that spouting pipe. I've met some real gentlemen who regard me as one of us not one of them because we use the same pub, gentlemen careful not to use abuse about nutters and careful not to frighten me with the harsher sorts of pub banter when I'm not well, far kinder to me than some of my graduate acquaintances who use abuse constantly and will apply my diagnosis to insult people they don't like. Curious. They'd slit their wrists rather than use racist abuse and quite rightly so, they're blind when it comes to abusing the most vulnerable members of the community, and sneer at cockney culture and comparatively less well educated people, what they don't realise is that it makes wonderful copy! As I say, never underestimate the power of a sick mind ho ho.
Anne Rees
Saturday 16 January 2010
Thinking of building an ark
16 1 2010
It's good to have firm footing after so much compacted ice on the pavements, I fairly burn them up because I like moving fast and freely, just as well I do have firm footing given the umbrellas wielded by people without regard for other pedestrians, my weaving and dodging would earn me a fortune in the premier league if I only took a football with me. Expeditions into the rain are light relief from composing approaches to friendly editors begging them to (a) look at my website and (b) if they like it, to mention it in editorials, sometimes I come over hot and cold at my cheek, more neck than a giraffe. My daughter Esther and adoptive daughter Angela her best mate tell me it's the same as blowing your own trumpet in job applications and interviews, you have to be confident and positive about what you could bring to a workplace, cringeworthy as the process is but if you don't ask you don't get. I am confident I've written Town Unlike to the best of my ability and it is a positive account of schizophrenia, sounding tentative and unsure would come across as coy and amateurish when I'm a professional about my work, but oh dear, it's good to get outside and get moving to shake off the feelings inspired by an own trumpet solo!
Egotists everywhere tend to be taken at their own estimation of themselves, it took me longer than it should have done to find that some authorities aren't real authorities at all they've just nominated themselves then daunted shyer souls with weighty sounding criticisms and pronouncements. I've had work rejected and trashed for the most specious of reasons and crawled away in abject humiliation, these days I can tell the difference between someone not finding my style congenial or pointing out shortcomings, and someone who will aggrandise themselves at my expense and appoint themselves as judge and jury and get a thrill out of fault finding, feeling that makes a genius and isn't it fun to rip into submitted work and make a joke of it? It would be nice to think one's work speaks for itself and with the majority of editors that's true, they don't want submissions accompanied by an essay on one's private opinion of what poetry is about and what makes a poem. I'm in the position of trying to attract readers so Town Unlike will speak for itself, but people need to be told it's there and given a taster to pique their interest, or it'll bomb into the abyss and no-one will be the wiser. Hence being positive and confident in approaches to editors to convince them the work is worth a look, and I'm making it sound reasonable to myself as I type this in to get over my nervousness.
www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk is the bunny to look for, as in let the dog see the rabbit, for an everyday story of what it's like to be schizophrenic, thrills and spills included and a challenge to the prejudiced and abusive, yes, this is what you sound like from my point of view! And an appeal to the tolerant and better informed, this is my take on schizophrenia and my mission of enlightenment, your tolerance isn't a lonely spark in universal darkness. On that confident positive note I'll sign off, best wishes, Anne Rees.
It's good to have firm footing after so much compacted ice on the pavements, I fairly burn them up because I like moving fast and freely, just as well I do have firm footing given the umbrellas wielded by people without regard for other pedestrians, my weaving and dodging would earn me a fortune in the premier league if I only took a football with me. Expeditions into the rain are light relief from composing approaches to friendly editors begging them to (a) look at my website and (b) if they like it, to mention it in editorials, sometimes I come over hot and cold at my cheek, more neck than a giraffe. My daughter Esther and adoptive daughter Angela her best mate tell me it's the same as blowing your own trumpet in job applications and interviews, you have to be confident and positive about what you could bring to a workplace, cringeworthy as the process is but if you don't ask you don't get. I am confident I've written Town Unlike to the best of my ability and it is a positive account of schizophrenia, sounding tentative and unsure would come across as coy and amateurish when I'm a professional about my work, but oh dear, it's good to get outside and get moving to shake off the feelings inspired by an own trumpet solo!
Egotists everywhere tend to be taken at their own estimation of themselves, it took me longer than it should have done to find that some authorities aren't real authorities at all they've just nominated themselves then daunted shyer souls with weighty sounding criticisms and pronouncements. I've had work rejected and trashed for the most specious of reasons and crawled away in abject humiliation, these days I can tell the difference between someone not finding my style congenial or pointing out shortcomings, and someone who will aggrandise themselves at my expense and appoint themselves as judge and jury and get a thrill out of fault finding, feeling that makes a genius and isn't it fun to rip into submitted work and make a joke of it? It would be nice to think one's work speaks for itself and with the majority of editors that's true, they don't want submissions accompanied by an essay on one's private opinion of what poetry is about and what makes a poem. I'm in the position of trying to attract readers so Town Unlike will speak for itself, but people need to be told it's there and given a taster to pique their interest, or it'll bomb into the abyss and no-one will be the wiser. Hence being positive and confident in approaches to editors to convince them the work is worth a look, and I'm making it sound reasonable to myself as I type this in to get over my nervousness.
www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk is the bunny to look for, as in let the dog see the rabbit, for an everyday story of what it's like to be schizophrenic, thrills and spills included and a challenge to the prejudiced and abusive, yes, this is what you sound like from my point of view! And an appeal to the tolerant and better informed, this is my take on schizophrenia and my mission of enlightenment, your tolerance isn't a lonely spark in universal darkness. On that confident positive note I'll sign off, best wishes, Anne Rees.
Saturday 9 January 2010
The more it snows tiddlely pom
9 1 2010
Pooh may have made up songs in the snow, I slip and slide and swear like a trooper, luckily I have a wide and colourful vocabulary with which to express myself and old ladies look at me with respect, the old ladies in this part of east London are tough and use swear words like punctuation when roused. A Town Unlike alice is up and running as an alternative to the content on my website, www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, it looks a bit bare apart from the Alice Springs photo which my brother took as a laugh while he was travelling round Australia working illegally, he got his wife to stand behind the place name with the piece of cardboard, up a bit down a bit etc. I'm going to look for photos of blackberries, snowy woods and fireworks to liven the bareness up a bit, all that unrelieved text is a bit intimidating. I was annoyed by a couple of journalists on Breakfast TV talking about the latest attempt by members of the cabinet to unseat Gordon Brown, they're mad said one, no, I felt like shouting, don't blame the mad we don't do things like that, we're only too grateful to anyone who shows us kindness, they're sane it's the sane who can be so horrible to each other and everyone else. They kept repeating they're mad and I thought well I know you're on TV so constrained a little but surely you could come up with something original instead of stale old abuse.
It's not the vocabulary per se that annoys me so much it's the ill will with which it's used and the assumption that the mad are sub human and incomprehensible, reiterating that does nothing to increase understanding and common humanity it reinforces unreasoning fear and ignorance. Being mentally ill is like being Black back in the nineteen fifties, you hear abuse wherever you go and it's so common people don't hear what is coming out of their mouths nor how offensive they're being to people who are sensitive and vulnerable already. It's the ill will that causes the offence and it's frightening.
I have my 2010 Writer's Handbook and currently I've been revising poems ready to send them to editors of poetry magazines, the Writer's Handbook published addresses but I've had a look through the list of magazines and several are listed that have folded. It's very much trial and error when you confidently post work off, some magazines don't bother to reply and I always include an SSAE, others are quick, efficient and professional, all praise to their hard work because they're in it for the love of the thing. Seven months later I got a reply today to say the magazine had gone, courteous because they didn't have to bother, cross that one off the list and thank the Lord it wasn't a rejection! The Reater is one magazine that never responds, I looked up their website and Myspace adddresses, status: drunk, it said of one of the editors, oh so that's why you don't respond, then there was something about wanting to f@ck an old man in a supermarket, if I ever go to Hull I won't be using any supermarkets. Quantum Leap, Carrillon, Fire and many more are clean different things, intelligent, interested and interesting, Pulsar, Awen and Imagenation are also very good, any of you out there with work to send off try any of them they'll treat you with intelligent understanding and professionalism.
I've replaced the u in the above paragraph not because I'm mealy mouthed but because I'm unsure of the rules or firewall, the firewall at the Environment Agency where one of my daughters works is hyper sensitive, Nads short for Nadia had it screaming and blowing whistles and posting pornography warnings. As my brother in Australia says, computers are stupid and can't think or tell you what you need to do, he's just learning and has been heard to threaten his machine with being unplugged and then it won't look so clever, aha got you there! Firewalls display the same characteristics, it's like trying to hold a conversation with someone who takes everything literally so you can't communicate any abstract sense, it leaves you feeling that belting them over the head with a chair might get through. My husband encountered a Fundamental Christian with those characteristics on a bus, she was horribly rude to a little Asian lad and when my husband remonstrated with for God's Sake be reasonable she denounced him for taking the Lord's name in vain and carried on with the rudeness for the rest of the journey. He'd meant for the sake of God because the Asian kid was tearful, but what can you do?
Off the point as usual, but perhaps Dirk Gently was right and everything is connected and happens for a purpose, hats off to Douglas Adams I'll go with that,
Anne Rees
Pooh may have made up songs in the snow, I slip and slide and swear like a trooper, luckily I have a wide and colourful vocabulary with which to express myself and old ladies look at me with respect, the old ladies in this part of east London are tough and use swear words like punctuation when roused. A Town Unlike alice is up and running as an alternative to the content on my website, www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, it looks a bit bare apart from the Alice Springs photo which my brother took as a laugh while he was travelling round Australia working illegally, he got his wife to stand behind the place name with the piece of cardboard, up a bit down a bit etc. I'm going to look for photos of blackberries, snowy woods and fireworks to liven the bareness up a bit, all that unrelieved text is a bit intimidating. I was annoyed by a couple of journalists on Breakfast TV talking about the latest attempt by members of the cabinet to unseat Gordon Brown, they're mad said one, no, I felt like shouting, don't blame the mad we don't do things like that, we're only too grateful to anyone who shows us kindness, they're sane it's the sane who can be so horrible to each other and everyone else. They kept repeating they're mad and I thought well I know you're on TV so constrained a little but surely you could come up with something original instead of stale old abuse.
It's not the vocabulary per se that annoys me so much it's the ill will with which it's used and the assumption that the mad are sub human and incomprehensible, reiterating that does nothing to increase understanding and common humanity it reinforces unreasoning fear and ignorance. Being mentally ill is like being Black back in the nineteen fifties, you hear abuse wherever you go and it's so common people don't hear what is coming out of their mouths nor how offensive they're being to people who are sensitive and vulnerable already. It's the ill will that causes the offence and it's frightening.
I have my 2010 Writer's Handbook and currently I've been revising poems ready to send them to editors of poetry magazines, the Writer's Handbook published addresses but I've had a look through the list of magazines and several are listed that have folded. It's very much trial and error when you confidently post work off, some magazines don't bother to reply and I always include an SSAE, others are quick, efficient and professional, all praise to their hard work because they're in it for the love of the thing. Seven months later I got a reply today to say the magazine had gone, courteous because they didn't have to bother, cross that one off the list and thank the Lord it wasn't a rejection! The Reater is one magazine that never responds, I looked up their website and Myspace adddresses, status: drunk, it said of one of the editors, oh so that's why you don't respond, then there was something about wanting to f@ck an old man in a supermarket, if I ever go to Hull I won't be using any supermarkets. Quantum Leap, Carrillon, Fire and many more are clean different things, intelligent, interested and interesting, Pulsar, Awen and Imagenation are also very good, any of you out there with work to send off try any of them they'll treat you with intelligent understanding and professionalism.
I've replaced the u in the above paragraph not because I'm mealy mouthed but because I'm unsure of the rules or firewall, the firewall at the Environment Agency where one of my daughters works is hyper sensitive, Nads short for Nadia had it screaming and blowing whistles and posting pornography warnings. As my brother in Australia says, computers are stupid and can't think or tell you what you need to do, he's just learning and has been heard to threaten his machine with being unplugged and then it won't look so clever, aha got you there! Firewalls display the same characteristics, it's like trying to hold a conversation with someone who takes everything literally so you can't communicate any abstract sense, it leaves you feeling that belting them over the head with a chair might get through. My husband encountered a Fundamental Christian with those characteristics on a bus, she was horribly rude to a little Asian lad and when my husband remonstrated with for God's Sake be reasonable she denounced him for taking the Lord's name in vain and carried on with the rudeness for the rest of the journey. He'd meant for the sake of God because the Asian kid was tearful, but what can you do?
Off the point as usual, but perhaps Dirk Gently was right and everything is connected and happens for a purpose, hats off to Douglas Adams I'll go with that,
Anne Rees
Sunday 3 January 2010
more about A Town Unlike Alice
3 1 2010
John my son reports the website as unfinished but assures me it'll be all singing all dancing once finished, no doubt if you're feeling a bit jaded it'll tell you to put your feet up and make you a nice cup of tea as well. I wanted to launch it tomorow because it'll be my ahem-th wedding anniversary, John says he can have it roughly displaying the work by then, I suppose it'll be a bit like the ferro concrete shell of a building you see when they're putting up another monolith in the City, you can see the sky defined in building shape, gaping windowless and roofless, but it takes an imaginative effort to people the shell with office workers, plastered walls and golden reflective windows, the portico proudly displaying the logo of some multi national firm. And, ha ha, sheltering half a dozen desperate smokers to give the proud logo that Third World association, as a smoker myself I like the anarchic homeless suggestion fellow smokers give to their places of employment!
Let's try another paragraph and see if I can keep to the subject, my website address is www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, mind the concrete blocks, stacked pipes and don't touch the wiring, clap your hard hat on your head and have a look at A Town Unlike Alice. Because it's about schizophrenia I've made it dramatic and sexy, in the compell your attention sense, after all the media can't report anything about a sufferer without sensationalising so if one wants to redress the balance on the side of truth, one must make that equally compelling. All the characters are based on real people and their actions have really happened, the taping of Alice's mouth is a dramatisation of what it's like to be treated as a taboo weirdo, no-one talks to you, anything you say is treated with suspicious wariness and people nervously look round for your keeper if you express an opinion, I kid you not. It's like being the scapegoat, hung about with bells and bundles and driven out of the village to take away the bad luck or evil eye or whatever and it's a horrible way to feel. Like an extreme of finding yourself among peple who don't like you much and trying to make conversation to carry it off, aware it's not going down well and wishing the ground would open and cover you, anything to get out of the situation. Such reactions from people you've known for years add to the misery and isolate you further, and one thing any sufferer from schizophrenia is, is miserably, God forsakenly unhappy and isolated.
The point of the Gospel quotation about the Good Samaritan is self evident, who is my neighbour? Alice and anyone like her when people treat her like that and make her feel ten times worse. I wrote Town Unlike with gusto, turning tables on unthinking attitudes and paying off old scores, to paraphrase Burns there's a schizophrenic among you taking notes, I may have been made to feel bitterly unhappy, it didn't stop me thinking and paying attention to what went on. People like me have no white bandages to signal the need for considerate treatment and sympathetic interest, we look the same as everyone else, my blood still runs cold at some of the things people say right out loud like the road sweepers going through the hospital grounds when I wasa patient, hope we don't meet no nutters said one to the other as I walked past! I suppose they expected swivelling eyes and foaming mouths like the old cartoons of Tony Benn, they didn't give me a second glance and I was both hurt and amused, it was an unkind and stupid thing to say but their happy complacency and unawareness was funny when the worst sort of nutter, from their point of view, was two feet away on the same pavement.
It's an appropriate time of year to say fear not I bring you glad tidings, but if you look at Town Unlike you'll see you have nothing to fear despite popular prejudice; popular prejudice is what I fear most, it prevents people from thinking critically and from seeing what is under their noses. The mentally ill were slaughtered along with the Jews in Nazi Germany. All the best to everyone for the New Year, Anne Rees.
John my son reports the website as unfinished but assures me it'll be all singing all dancing once finished, no doubt if you're feeling a bit jaded it'll tell you to put your feet up and make you a nice cup of tea as well. I wanted to launch it tomorow because it'll be my ahem-th wedding anniversary, John says he can have it roughly displaying the work by then, I suppose it'll be a bit like the ferro concrete shell of a building you see when they're putting up another monolith in the City, you can see the sky defined in building shape, gaping windowless and roofless, but it takes an imaginative effort to people the shell with office workers, plastered walls and golden reflective windows, the portico proudly displaying the logo of some multi national firm. And, ha ha, sheltering half a dozen desperate smokers to give the proud logo that Third World association, as a smoker myself I like the anarchic homeless suggestion fellow smokers give to their places of employment!
Let's try another paragraph and see if I can keep to the subject, my website address is www.aliceworeareddress.co.uk, mind the concrete blocks, stacked pipes and don't touch the wiring, clap your hard hat on your head and have a look at A Town Unlike Alice. Because it's about schizophrenia I've made it dramatic and sexy, in the compell your attention sense, after all the media can't report anything about a sufferer without sensationalising so if one wants to redress the balance on the side of truth, one must make that equally compelling. All the characters are based on real people and their actions have really happened, the taping of Alice's mouth is a dramatisation of what it's like to be treated as a taboo weirdo, no-one talks to you, anything you say is treated with suspicious wariness and people nervously look round for your keeper if you express an opinion, I kid you not. It's like being the scapegoat, hung about with bells and bundles and driven out of the village to take away the bad luck or evil eye or whatever and it's a horrible way to feel. Like an extreme of finding yourself among peple who don't like you much and trying to make conversation to carry it off, aware it's not going down well and wishing the ground would open and cover you, anything to get out of the situation. Such reactions from people you've known for years add to the misery and isolate you further, and one thing any sufferer from schizophrenia is, is miserably, God forsakenly unhappy and isolated.
The point of the Gospel quotation about the Good Samaritan is self evident, who is my neighbour? Alice and anyone like her when people treat her like that and make her feel ten times worse. I wrote Town Unlike with gusto, turning tables on unthinking attitudes and paying off old scores, to paraphrase Burns there's a schizophrenic among you taking notes, I may have been made to feel bitterly unhappy, it didn't stop me thinking and paying attention to what went on. People like me have no white bandages to signal the need for considerate treatment and sympathetic interest, we look the same as everyone else, my blood still runs cold at some of the things people say right out loud like the road sweepers going through the hospital grounds when I wasa patient, hope we don't meet no nutters said one to the other as I walked past! I suppose they expected swivelling eyes and foaming mouths like the old cartoons of Tony Benn, they didn't give me a second glance and I was both hurt and amused, it was an unkind and stupid thing to say but their happy complacency and unawareness was funny when the worst sort of nutter, from their point of view, was two feet away on the same pavement.
It's an appropriate time of year to say fear not I bring you glad tidings, but if you look at Town Unlike you'll see you have nothing to fear despite popular prejudice; popular prejudice is what I fear most, it prevents people from thinking critically and from seeing what is under their noses. The mentally ill were slaughtered along with the Jews in Nazi Germany. All the best to everyone for the New Year, Anne Rees.
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