Close to the realities of the age?

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.

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!

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!

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.

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

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.

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.