Janis Joplin: Summertime

I'm not very good at being left. I'm even worse at telling the difference between being left and being abandoned. Most of the time it doesn't even occur to me that there is a difference, that there are ways of people walking away which don't involve them not looking back over their shoulder. Right now, my best friend is leaving to live in Ireland- somewhere on the coast of the sticky out bit on the bottom left, if you're iinterested. He probably told me the name, but I was probably drunk. Predictably, I'm not dealing with it very well. Thus I find myself hiding in my spare room at two on a tuesday afternoon wearing pink moon boots and an enormous red fluffy cardigan. They clash terribly but I don't care, which itself is a sign of the depth of my malaise. I've made a den of pillows and blankets. Leaving it, even to go downstairs to take a piss or make another cup of coffee makes me feel exposed and in danger. Although, come to think of it, if I made fewer cups of coffee I wouldn't need to piss so often; I could probably halve the number of times I need to leave the security of my little hovel just by doing that, and also if my caffine intake was lower my left leg wouldn't be twitching quuite so much. Hell yes. Logic as the tool of the mad.

I don't deal well with being left. I find it hard to believe that people will come back. I find it hard not to think a tad apocalyptically- my life is empty, there is no one left (despite the obvious untruth of this), no one will ever love me, no one will ever stay. I find it hard to accept the truth- that people do leave, and then they return. Or they don't return. Either way it's not my fault, and I, like Celine Dion, will go on. Although, like Celine Dion, I probably shouldn't. Or so it seems from here.

I don't deal well with being left. I slip quickly into the worst possible form of shadow life. I can't face anything. I can't talk to peopl and I don't want anyone near me. Touch seems to burn. I can't summon the energy or the will for simple tasks. About ten years ago I saw a drawing by Blake of the corner of a room, done in pencil. In my mind, that is what this place looks like- blank and empty. Safe, though, in its annonymity. I don't particularly want to leave. I sit in the corner with the wall at my back, and I just keep on sitting. I stare without interest from the window or immerse myself in DVDs of american TV series'- the televisual equivalent of smack- sweet, addictive, an eater of days, but ultimately resulting in your brain rotting and dribbling out of all the holes in your face.

I don't expect this to sound like anything other than self-indulgence, but it isn't that, quite. It's what happens when your brain shuts off any sort of emotion. The brain isn't too good at filtering out one type of feeling from another. It can't really tell the difference between pain and sadness and anger and cheerfullness and irritation. So if, like mine, your brain has the learned response to overwhelming emotion of simply blocking whatever emotion it is which is doing the overwhelming, then it doesn't discriminate. It blocks out everything. All those emotions you hardly ever notice which get you up in the morning- interest, excitement, anger, duty, whatever floats you- go too. What is left is a big hole which manifests itself as a sort of boredom- the eternal ennui of the long distance soul, or something. I've tried to fill out my diary card for therapy every day this week. I'm supposed to tick boxes to describe how I've been feeling. I can't think of anything to tick. The whole week is left blank. Which is what it's like.

I know I should stand up. I know that this sort of behaviour can only make things worse. I've known this since sunday, when I ran away from a one day festival in Hyde Park and walked around London for hours with the only person I know whose presence I can tolerate at times like these. We window shopped for houses and I dreamed of a future in which I live on my own in peace and isolation and sing for a living. I came home and sat up till five in the morning, doing nothing in particular.

Here's the funny thing though. I've been here before, more times than I can remember. When a boy doesn't call me back. When an email isn't answered. When my ex has a new partner. When I row with a friend. When my therapist cancels a session. Everything from my mother's death to the man in the fucking corner shop not returning my smile induces this numbness. Every time it's the same- I hole myself up in my house for a week like a wounded animal and refuse to answer the phone. Eventually, the numbness wears off, I start feeling things again, the boredom stops and I can muster up enough interest in the world to do the washing up and have a shower and go out. What it feels like to be sitting here, though. That's different from the times before. I haven't once in the last three days contemplated suicide. I say this matter of factly because it's a simple matter of fact- suicidal ideation has always been a symptom of this before; it goes together like shopp-de-fucking-whatever. In it's place there is something different; something like resignation, or endurance. This week is just something to be lived through, like I've lived through it before.

There used to be a poem which would come to my head on days like these. It's by Berryman, and the lines which come to mind are: "I don't feel this will change. / I don't want any thing / or person, familiar or strange. / I don't think I will sing / any more just now; / or ever..." Today, something else is stuck in my head- Summertime, in the voice of Janis Joplin. You need to hear the words in this voice, raw and true, to understand why this isn't as wholly fucking corney as it sounds. The song isn't so much like a lullaby when it's sung by a blues-harsh smack addict. Unsuprisingly. It sounds like a promise of protection offered by someone powerless to protect, and the only thing that rings positive is the line which sticks in my head, switched in my mind from third person to first- "One of these mornings, I'm gonna rise up singing". Hell, it sounds corney awhatever voice it's in and my attempt at cultural reference distraction wont change that, but I hold onto that line with all the fervour of the convert. I'm sitting dressed like a sartorially misguided extra from Fame on a pile of rags surrounded entrely by mess, and the only time I have ventured further than the corner shop in the last few days I felt like I was in Blade Runner adn had to run away, ignominiously. I'm allowed to hold onto any line I damn well like if I think it might help.

I'm not very good at being left. Maybe I never will be. My best friend, who has held my hand through all the crap even when I was being irritating as only an overeducated borderline with a penchant for razorblades can be irritating, and who is one of the few people I have ever trusted, is moving over the sea to write a novel, like the big damn cliche he is, and I am not dealing with it very well. I am dealing with it though. And I find that I understand the difference between being left and being abandoned. People who leave come back; or they don't. Either way, they don't stop looking back, adn they don't find it so easy, and they stop to say goodbye. People who abandon you walk away without a glance. Obviously this brings up the matter of Orpheus and, you know, the underworld and shit, and the whole looking back and losing Euridice but we'll just put that down as the exception that proves my somewhat sentimental, ill-thought out rule. Besides, Orpheus was given due warning that the usual rules didn't apply, and if there's one thing that classical mythology should have taught us it's that if the gods tell you to do something then you should probably, you know, just do it.

This post has no substance particularly. I'm not in my right mind, you know. Someone is leaving, and I'm not dealing with it well. I have found comfort, though. In American TV, mainly. If the worst comes to the worst and you have to leave on a plane with some other guy, and I have to walk away with the funny-faced dimiutive policeman, and if life comes between us as life has a tendency to do, and the problems of three little people don't add up to a hill of beans in my crazy head, then at least we'll always have bittorrent.

Elgar: Dream of Gerontius

Appologies if this post comes across religious on yo' asses, and it will. It's late; I'm feeling tired and sad and ruminative, and my mind is buzzing. It's fucking hot. I have all the windows open. The hot weather always seems to do odd things to me. There is nothing that lifts the spirits like waking to a pure blue morning, and nothing that deadens them like its closing in sultriness and dust and the city's shrouding pollution haze. As a result every day of the heat wave is like a minor essay in manic depression, and I spend a lot of nights sitting in my attic, looking out towards canary wharf, watching the lights in the tower blocks blink out. I have always loved high places and high windows. As a child, growing up in a tall house surrounded by moorland, I would spend hours, amongst the horror and the train wreck of my parent's relationship and my father's abuse, curled up on a window seat watching cloud shadows move across the hills, marking the passiing of time with the colour of the heather and the varying bleakness of the sky. There is something ineffably comforting in the feeling of being so small, so insignficant, all pain eased by the simple fact of space. "...and immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: the sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless". There is peace in distance, and sadness, and I'll take the latter if I can find the former there.

Christianity has had a hold over my mind this last week which seems to have been emphasised by events. I've been learning the part of the Angel in the Dream of Gerontius. There is nothing more evocative than music if, as I do, you have a tendency to listen obsessively to one thing through any particular period of your life. The Dream is one of the only things I have listened to consistently over the last ten years or so, and as a reult it seems to bring with it some buggered palimpsest of the whole period, so that if I let my mind drift I can reach out and touch the summer I discovered fun and boys and drink and drugs, the first time I fell in love, teenage angst and alienation, living alone for the first time at sixteen, my A-levels, my first days at Cambridge, my last days at Cambridge with all the dissillusion and dissolution that accompanied them, caring for my mother and her funeral, and all the darkness of the year that followed. A potted history of me in one great Catholic monument. There's a thing. Learning it, reaching the sort of familiarity with text and music which you can only gaiin by pouring over the score for hours at a motherfucking time, I have begun to wonder if the reason I have come back to it so often is that it deals so capably with the theme of redemption.

On thursday I went to see the beating of the retreat at hourseguards parade with my grandfather (and, as a side note, I got to flirt with an actual red-coated member of the household cavalry, which I think largely completed me as a person) and while squinting at men doing complicatedthings with horses and trombones found myself talking about this with him. He made the point that a lot is said in these (hem hem) times about forgiveness being the central tennet of Christianity, but that this is a misnomer. It isn't forgiveness which is important, but the darker, more complex theme of redemption. It's not an easy thing to get your head round. Mozart, for example, for all his adeptness at dealing with forgiveness, only really touches on it in Don Giovanni where the Don, who fails to repent, is consequently denyed redemption- redempton being characterised in Mozart, tacitly, as getting it on with whoever has the name which sounds most like yours- and is dragged down to hell by the statue of the father of the girl he has, um, wronged. Or tried to wrong, anyway. Gerontius, conversely, barely features forgiveness at all. It deals solely in redemption- in a man, sinned against and sinning, facing the moment of his redemption and being afraid. Elgar said (and it is true he was a better composer than writer) "Look here: I imagined Gerontius to be a man like us, not a Priest or a Saint, but a sinner, a repentant one of course but still no end of a worldly man in his life, & now brought to book... It is, I imagine, much more difficult to tear one's self away from a well to do world than from a cloister..." Gerontius is saved, but he is saved not through the forgiveness of others or of God, but by himself going through the process, both painful and strange, of redemption. Forgiveness is easy; forgiveness is a movement in the mind, of you or another, but redemption is something you suffer, something you do and something you live. In this way, to my mind, redemption has more in common with love than does forgiveness. To forgive someone you need only think and feel. Love is an action, a thing you do, a way of behaving, a way of living. And is consequently by far the harder half of the equation. It is true that redemption requires forgiveness, but forgiveness is only the start. You seek it so that you can begin, not so that you can end. Forgiveness is important because it gives you the chance to atone, to make amends, to seek redemption. And so, when Gerontius asks if he will see the face of God, the angel replies:
"There was a mortal, who is now above
In the mid-glory: he, when near to die,
Was given communion with the Crucified, -
Such that the Masters very wounds were stamped
Upon his flesh; and from the agony
Which thrilled through body and soul in that embrace,
Learn that the flame of the Everlasting Love
Doth burn ere it transform. . ."
And so the soul of Gerontius, sinned against and sinning, goes not to heaven but to purgatory, because redemption is achieved not through forgiveness but through living. As much as a, you know, shade of a person can be said to live.

I find myself living this process now, and so returning to Gerontius again. I have, to all intents and purposes, given up self-harm. That, it seems, was the easy bit. In my mind, I have forgiven myself- for the wrongs I have done, real or imagined, for all the pain I have inflicted on people who, however strange their ways of showing it, loved me. For not saving my father from alcoholism or my mother from cancer or myself from everything, for doing what I ought not to have done and leaving undone that which I ought to have done. I have stopped punishing myself. But that is only the beginning. It is worse now, in many ways, than it has ever been. With forgiveness comes the realisation that there isn't any simple solution. I can't just pick up a razor and make it go away; I have to live with guilt and shame, whether deserved or not. When actively self-harming I didn't, oddly, think about it msuch. The thought came, and then the action, and then peace, of a sort. Now, I can think of nothing else. My mind is filled constantly with images of injury, with the soft thock sound of a razor on skin, with images of blood and bleeding, with the absolute comfort of cuddling a lacerated arm to my chest. I've taken up smoking again, for something to do, for a more subtle means of self-destruction. No, scrap that. I haven't taken it up for self-destruction but just for something to entertain my fingers, for a way of marking the moment and passing the time. I don't really think of acting on the urges now, but that doesn't make them go away; rather, it makes them intensify in some sort of baroque fantasy of wounding. With forgiveness comes the acceptance of my right to feel and so my feeling run amok, making up for lost time, spilling out across the canvas in reds and browns and the blues.

Forgiveness gave me the chance at hope. Now comes my own personal purgatory. Redemption is something you live. It is easy to talk about being redeemed from your past, of starting a new life, but you don't get a clean slate just by saying that you no longer hate. You have to try and live each new pathway, each alternative. You have to recant, repent. Repentance, too, isn't easy. It's not a thing you say, but a thing you do each time you are given the choice. Every time I see clearly that the only way to end this is to hurt myself, I have to take the other way. So I see that redemption isn't a momentary salvation but a thng you live, every moment of your life. There was my past, and the chemical makeup of my brain, and if I am to redeem these things then I can't just do it now, but also every other now. Am I ranting? Am I making myself clear? I don't know how to say that which I am searching for. After every action comes a reaction and the same is true of the act of forgiveness. Live through the reaction, and you might just be redeemed. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of living your life free of the thoughts of injury, and free of the burden of guilt. To quote another, yes, another, bit of scripture: "I never said it would be easy, I said it would be worth it". I know it isn't easy. I'll let you know if it's worth it. And there endeth the lesson for the day.