Prognosis

Life is disconcertingly beautiful right now, primarily because of spring and all its attendant glories of bud, leaf and clear sky after such a long and unforgiving winter that it seemed the White Witch had gotten dominion and even I (one of its greatest erstwhile fans) turned my back on it. This being so, and me being in a reasonably sanguine state of mind, it was a curious juxtaposition to hear Shrink (yes, we're back together) say that life is a sexually transmitted disease with a bad prognosis. I can't actually remember what the actual context was, and obviously it was a joke, not an original one either, it was R.D. Laing who first said it, I think. And it's a weird thing for a Shrink to be saying, whatever the context, but he is weird and I must be bonkers to keep seeing him. So obviously I need a Shrink, and one way or another it all works itself out.

Mr. Signs and I have finished watching the boxed set for In Treatment (season one) with the lovely Gabriel Byrne playing the Shrink. Feeling somewhat bereft now, especially as season two isn't available on dvd yet. Almost unbelievably, it seems that Gabriel Byrne has never actually had therapy himself.

A shadow looms over the beautiful life (afternoon tea and Pimms on the patio) in the form of new neighbours' plans to build a two-storey extension which would have a significant impact on the amount of light we get. We would, in fact, be drinking Pimms in the shadow.

There is always something.

Pipework

Two good things. Well, more than just two, but the ones I will mention have to do with The Writing.

For firstly, five of my poems are out in the latest (No. 48) edition of Obsessed With Pipework (subtitle: poetry with strangeness and charm), and one of them is called Reading the Signs. I really like this quarterly, and not just because the editor was good enough to take my poems. It has the look and feel of the kind of pamphlets one used to come across in what I shall euphemistically call a more rockanroll decade - something that has a cobbled together kind of look, but it is cobbled with artistry and soul - not to mention strangeness and charm. I subscribed to it when blogfriend and writer Ms Pants had her poems published there, and I have read every copy since (unusually for me) from first poem to last and been pleased to see some erstwhile writing cronies from Hackney days represented there. With neurologically challenged brain, it is difficult to keep finger on the pulse and read, as well as digest, everything that one would like to. So OWP is a very good thing for me, nicely made, with concentrated poetry nourishment I appreciate.

For secondly, I am - as I cavalierly bragged in the last post - taking part in this year's NaNoWriMo, and I have bashed out exactly 10,0005 words in six days. This is, to put you in the picture, exactly five words more than I need to be on track for my 50,000 by the end of the month. It is testing my strength to the limit, but so far so good, and look - I am even putting up a post as well. Muscles are aching, eyes are smarting, but this feels like a breeze compared to the hacking-a-path-through-the-mountain that is fiction-writing. Someone, but I can't remember who, described it as such and I felt it was, as far as my process was concerned, accurate. I know what is on the other side of the mountain and have a rough idea of what I might need to do in order to get there, but the path is made with much effort and with no guarantee that you are really heading in the right direction, but if you keep going you are going to get out somewhere, and if it is not exactly the spot you intended, never mind. I have written short stories, poems, bits of novel, but never yet actually done the long haul. When I reach the pearly gates I would like to say that I had a go. And this, I suppose, for better or worse, is it.

You will surely be wondering about Shrink, and where he fits into all of this. Obviously I have had to let him go - the road was, in every possible sense, too long, arduous and expensive and, well, all things must end, even psychoanalytic therapy. At the back of my mind, also, was the image of Woody Allen in Sleepers, waking up some time far in the future and working out that he might just, at this point have completed his psychoanalytic treatment. Don't ask me if it has done any good, I probably won't know until half way through my next incarnation. What I do know is that the notion of banging one's head against a brick wall, and how good it feels when you stop doing that, resonates.

Laters, comrades.

Saved by the Bard

I can’t say anything without first mentioning the judicial review of the NICE guidelines for people with CFS/ME that is taking place at the High Court in London at the moment. I was first made aware of this by reading about it over at NMJ’s, and I had wanted to go along, give my presence there, as so many other PWME are doing. As it is, all I feel able to do is bring my awareness to the proceedings.

I am on Shrink duty again today. If nothing else, I have probably managed to bring a degree of enlightenment to him as to the nature of this particular illness, but it has been and is frustrating. I sense that he still thinks of it as a kind of smokescreen for other issues, rather than as a Big Issue in itself that does not live in isolation from everything else but carries its own unpredictable agenda and does not distinguish between good and bad stressors.

Thinking about the medical profession, Shrinks etc. takes me back to the time when my first baby, my daughter was born. It was an intensely joyful as well as an intensely difficult time. She was born by caesarean section after I had been in labour for a long time, in the Mile End hospital which was in such a sorry state that they actually ran out of nappies and formula milk (which every caesarean mother is likely to need at the outset because things take longer to get going). The nursing staff treated us as though we were criminals. Those of us who were unable to get up and fetch a cup of tea from the trolley were told to either “get it yourself or go without” – apply that kind of attitude to other situations and you get the picture. As I wasn’t healing properly the doctor said I needed to have complete uninterrupted rest, and the nurses’ response was to take my baby and shut her in an empty office unattended. Desperate as things were, on hearing her cries I staggered out of bed and hobbled along the corridor to where she lay in her Perspex box next to a room where the staff were boozing and having a smoke. I wheeled her back to my bedside and the next day we checked out, five days before time but I actually thought we might not survive a longer stay.

Various health visitors came to call. My baby had colic and woke through the night so I often took my sleep when she did, during the day. A young (childless) doctor, on hearing me express sadness that my child was suffering the pain of colic, coupled with the way I looked (sleep deprived) decided that I might be about to do myself in and sent a team of health and psychiatric people to investigate. Fortunately they came on a day when I was bright and cheerful, in the company of a friend, my baby dressed in her pink going-out suit, ready to take a walk. The health visitor told me I was not permitted to leave the house until I had talked to the Community Psychiatric Officer and I suddenly realised that baby and I were in imminent danger of being hauled off to a psychiatric unit for investigation and possible incarceration. My friend, who picked up the gist of the situation kept the health visitor occupied while I talked to the CPO who, I discovered, was interested in literature and had a particular fondness for the plays of Shakespeare, particular the later tragedies and a couple of the major comedies which I had just been studying at university where I had been as a mature student. Reader, Shakespeare saved me, or perhaps it was the Prince of Denmark who did, along with various clowns from the Forest of Arden. I was prepared to bend the ear of the CPO with literary insights for as long as it took to convince him that I was absolutely straight-up normal ticketyboo (I had worked as an auxiliary in a psychie unit and knew what might lie in store), and it worked. At the end of an hour or so, he shook my hand and thanked me for my time, giving me a clean bill of mental health, to the chagrin of the health visitor who had been looking forward to something a little more interesting and was miffed that I got off so lightly. Several months later the young doctor responsible for the shenanigans sent a message to apologise. She was pregnant, having complications, and realised how unhelpful her intervention might have been. Which was nice of her. But still, I sometimes come out in a sweat thinking about what might have happened.

The CPO went on to do an Eng Lit degree. So it goes.

The Body Electric (2)

It’s getting bad again. I know why, I think – it’s the frequent trips to Brighton, especially at a time of day when I should be lying down. Why do I always think I can get away with things? I had a reasonably good spell over the Christmas hols, but driving distances on a regular basis is not good. I have asked Shrink to give me an earlier time to see if this makes a difference. If not, I may have to stop going altogether, and how will he afford his citybreak holidays then? And damn his eyes anyway for still speaking about this as metaphor.

So what I am doing about all this is:
a) taking drugs (Co-prox never lets me down)
b) drinking
c) smoking
d) swearing
e) eating mince pies (found some leftover spelt pastry in the fridge).

In other words I’m being positive. But The Writing suffers and therefore so do I. Shrink is very sanguine about this because I have been writing down dreams and reading them out to him, and the last one had us both in bed together watching a performance involving a group of people doing strange things in a gymnasium, it was a bit avant garde for me but he seemed to enjoy it, both in the dream and in the consulting room.

I know I have had this thing for twenty two odd years, and I know that I am actually one of the luckier ones (for which believe me I am every day grateful). But there is this creature who every day wakes up with me and says that today is the first day of the rest of your life and everything might suddenly, inexplicably, be fine.
I am making ridiculous plans for things that I know I am unlikely to do. But I make them anyway, and perhaps some of them will bear fruit.

blogzen

A fellow blogger of my acquaintance has set herself the task of putting up a post a day. It is day two and she is already cursing – this is good, shows the zen is kicking in because hey, when the resistance manifests you know what you’re up against. I should be so lucky. Wait, what am I saying? Well first off I have never been much bothered by having nothing to say and could fill up screens and screens of words all about the saying of it – the nothing, I mean. But my courage fails me. Here, I think, my blog friend has the edge. For before you can even say John Cage I have taken the nothing by the scruff of the neck and turned it into something – in other words, reader, I chicken out: I wriggle, I contort, I think about what’s for breakfast tomorrow and there is no zen master to come and tap my spine, or whatever it is that they do, to bring me back to the nothing that my monkey mind is busy trying not to address.

But on the other hand there is always Shrink. My words fall into his cavernous etheric space and as far as I’m concerned this is as good as a hefty dose of zen for we are brought back to the nothing more times than I would care to count. And in the nothing there is always the something which is deeply and unutterably mysterious, or it is deeply and mysteriously unutterable, or it is the dog’s bollocks, but we have to go on because we are committed to the Process.

And sometimes one lacks a little in the Commitment department.

I thank you.

Couch Potato

In case you’re interested, it seems that I have three different types of Personality Disorder, namely: Paranoid, Schizotypal and Narcissistic. I did the test here, so it’s an established Fact, but my score only added up to “moderate” so I am pissed off: can’t even get top marks in a sodding personality disorder test, wouldn’t you know - the story of my life, which began with my daffodil only getting second prize when I was at primary school (I may forgive but I do not forget).

I am going to discuss this with Shrink, obviously. We will have what he increasingly refers to as one of our “tussles”, where I try to engage him in some kind of a debate that is commonly known as dialogue and he does not get drawn, makes gnomic utterances or says something deliberately provoking. He is trying to get me onto the Couch, which you might think is fair enough for a psychoanalytic shrink, but it’s just not natural, is it, semi-reclining while you talk to someone who is sitting just inches away from the back of your head. I’ve said that I’ll do it after my birthday (this weekend – send flowers, chocolates, gift tokens etc.), a kind of graduation ritual, and doubtless this will be playing in my head and I might even sing it out loud.

I sent some poems off to one of the big poetry magazines and got told that although it was thanks but no thanks, they enjoyed my work and please would I send more in the spring. What, for their personal enjoyment? Perhaps if I can get myself fully Paranoid, Schizotypal or Narcissistic my life might begin to take a real direction and hit the bull’s eye – so to speak. Couch may be a significant first step. I’ll keep you informed.

Meanwhile, why not take the PD test yourselves – let me know the results. I promise I won’t be jealous if your score is higher.

Signs and Blunders

It isn’t good to fall asleep after one in the morning and wake up shortly after four. It gets worse when you take your second herbal sedative and it has no effect, dawn comes as dawn always does and it’s too late for the last-resort 2mg valium. I think Fleur Adcock does a good job of nailing the condition in her poem Things:

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.

In my particular case, though, it isn’t just the worse things that come stalking in but the stupid trivial things and the whole catalogue of mundane tasks that need to be addressed at some point. True, the vegetable rack in the kitchen has been falling apart for a long time and we should get a new one – but fretting about this and similar at five a.m.? I should talk about this with Shrink, obviously, but he is one of the Things I fret about. Our relationship is going through a testing time, a bit like that of a newly married couple when the honeymoon is over and the bickering begins. Well never mind, I’m sure this is all very auspicious and we’ll carry on slugging it out until the day I shake hands with him Woody Allen-style and agree to call it a draw.

Meanwhile, it may or may not be the end of the world, but everyone keep calm. Something is happening underground – a collision of protons that will “usher in a new era of physics”. People are worried that the planet is going to be destroyed in the process, but no-one has actually gone around waving banners or chaining themselves to railings and the end is very probably not nigh. We carry on, folks – thinking about property prices, the effects of climate change, remembering to bring used polythene bags with us to the supermarket, putting plastic milk bottles in the special tray at the top of the wheelie bin and taking the daily vitamin pill at breakfast. We carry on having birthdays and saving the gift-wrapping paper for future use.

If there is no Big Bang, that doesn't necessarily mean there is nothing to worry about - the end might come like a slow fertilisation and a period of waiting while the thing that is to happen forms itself before hatching out. But as far as I’m concerned it’s not over till the fat lady sings and Signs and Wonders appear in the sky, and I do not count the fact of relentless rain and miserable skies as either a Sign or a Wonder. It is either global warming or just one of those things; it scuppered the holiday plans of anyone hoping for a sunny break in Cornwall and it ruined a number of homes but we go on. I think, all things considered, I am glad about this.

When it does come, the last breath, the bang, the end of all the cycles of birth and rebirth and the beginning of nothing or a fall into destruction, I would like to have the opportunity to say goodbye – not just to the sky, forest, lakes and all the people that watch, run, swim and breathe, but to the particulars: polythene bags; a metal key ring shaped like a dolphin; a withered carrot in the blue vegetable rack that has been coming apart so the trays keep falling on each other; the bird that flew against my friend’s window one day and left on the pane of glass a shadow: the impression of its face.

meanwhile, back at the ranch -

So now that Last Minute are out of the game, Son will be able to go to Edinburgh with jazz a cappella group and do his stuff there. Actually, he was determined to do this anyway, even if Last Minute had got through the next few rounds, but there would have been difficulties. I am worried about Daughter who fainted during rehearsals yesterday. She has taken on a demanding project, both directing and performing something she has written, and the dance element is very strenuous. She is ok now, but is clearly overdoing it and advice to take it easy and slow down just isn’t realistic. I say it anyway. The first performance is on Wednesday, after which things should ease up a little (yeah, right).

Here at Signs Cottage I am doing battle with my old friend M.E., engaged in mortal combat, clasped in its deadly embrace. I am trying to think of new, fresh ways to describe it. Passionate lover came to mind, but brought up the old Stalker image, and we have been there. Something from the Song of Solomon comes to me:

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

Yes, the strength and persistence of the fellow is overwhelming, he loves me ferociously, and grand passion, as we know, does have something of the religious about it. Even if the love is unrequited, one cannot help but stand back in awe, and there are moments when the inclination to submit is overwhelming. Submit in one’s soul, I mean, for one can’t help but give in at a physical level. I have more or less given up on the idea that one can think or Process one’s way out of this, but have to accept that occasionally this works well in the sense of giving the temporary illusion that things are “on track” and better, and these moments I do not despise. The problem with treading the path of Shrinkhood, the psyochoanalytic real deal, is that the aim is to come home to oneself – touch base. It has occurred to me that I must be mad to do this and really, between that and M.E. it does sometimes feel as though the rest of me might just go up in a puff of smoke. The pilgrim’s path was ever thus. I think I should have a medal for this, or at least a badge.

Not a lot to say. Or, perhaps, too much of the unsayable. One’s beloved offspring are busy, busy with creative projects (good), dealing with the slings and arrows that life inevitably throws (necessary) and fielding the rogue bastard elements that snake their way into the garden that is the sphere in which they live and have their being (ouch). Not to mention that one particular offspring’s group has got through to the next stage of a certain televised competition but the powers that be did not feature them at all, probably on account of their not providing enough televisual material in the way of weeping and hand-wringing (just as well, all considered, but disappointing for them).

I have M.E. Did I mention this? Yes, well I’ve had to mention it a couple of times recently in the context of Shrink sessions on account of him being a bit, shall we say, ignorant about it all, and following a conversation that went something like:
Signs: Do you actually believe in M.E. – you don’t do you?
Shrink: I don’t know.
Signs: Fuck.
But to his credit, he has been prepared to read stuff downloaded from the wonderful Hummingbirds site (on my sidebar) and taken it on board.
"I want to know what it means to you," says Shrink. I have given the short and the long answer. I could, I suppose, say – as some reality TV contestants are fond of doing – that it Means Everything. But strike me down with a sledgehammer if I do.

I am missing the services of the person who usually comes each week to vacuum the carpets, clean the kitchen/bathroom floors and change bed linen. She has gone away until September and it felt like too much hassle to try and find someone temporary to take her place. Lugging a vacuum cleaner up and down the steep and narrow stairs of Signs Cottage is out of the question, changing bed linen and cleaning kitchen floor are both difficult but possible if I choose the right moment. So Mr. Signs does the first and of course there is the option of allowing standards to slip a little, or a lot, here and there. It would make me happy for the house to be clean, but happier still to have written a new poem or story.

Regeneration

I’ve been thinking about the ‘intimate other’ that you build a relationship with when writing regularly in notebooks, as one frequently does if one is a writing person, even if one has no clear idea about the what or the why of putting down words on paper. Sometimes I imagine my intimate other as a ghostly version of me, but at other times it is I who am the ghost and she is the one imagining me, living the life.

Increasingly, I have become aware of this brooding presence at other times also – alongside me as I crank up each morning, trying to earth myself into my physical body, make a cup of coffee, filling the metal espresso-maker just level with black grounds, slice open a Kiwi fruit, eat a thin oat and apple biscuit; with me as I put my foot down hard on the accelerator on the road to Brighton, trying to get to my Shrink early enough to have five minutes before it’s time to ring the bell, in the car, underneath the huge oak tree where the brown bird hops on the grass and looks at me with one keen eye (it is my bird now, I’ve seen it three times, my tree also, I park under its shade); close by me when I walk into the large, white room where the chairs are always, but never quite, in the same position and I say, It’s like a stage set, the sense that invisible hands have been in between this time and the last and moved the furniture slightly, and he says, yes, the stage is set, and then there is silence. Sometimes I picture her crawling underneath the sofa with the Moroccan scatter cushions and looking at me and him in the white armchairs. Or we switch and it’s me there, and she is the one in the big chair talking or banging the arm of the chair and pulling at her hair while I sit waiting for her to finish whatever it is she has to do so we can go on to the next place, the next activity, which may be to go home and sleep and sleep, or it may be to take the white pills that put two hours of bliss into her muscles so they don’t hurt and then she can walk around a supermarket, buy meat and vegetables, shave the peel from a carrot and finely chop herbs; and she listens out for where I might be, her intimate other who says nothing at all, is quiet as the small brown bird who stands on a thin leg and watches. I am afraid, she says, that I do not have much time left. And then, I feel hopeful
(you are hoping, he says, against hope).
I can, she says, still salvage something. She is saying these things for my benefit, but really I don’t mind the life that we already live. It feels like a life to me; but then, I was never born and living with the fact of death as she is, as one is.

Unless you are The Doctor. Sorry to change tack so suddenly, but I have just resumed this post having watched today’s episode. Is this synchronicity, or what? The Doctor is dying, but even in the throes of death he is regenerating. I think he and I have a lot in common. I’m sorry, but I really do. And so does my intimate other who, at this particular moment, is keeping remarkably quiet.

Shrink Hydration

I make no apologies for this awful photo. I need a decent camera, my phone one seems to be getting worse, but it feels kind of appropriate to have this blurred-at-the-edges image of my recently-hydrated grow-your-own-therapist doll that I was given as an early Christmas present in December. I brought him along, still bubble-wrapped to my therapy session last week, intending for it to mark a transition between that time and this. My shrink is not one of those much given to the gratuitous merry jape and it was all rather embarrassing, especially when I said about putting him into water and watching him grow. "Lots of associations there, then," he said. What can he have been thinking about?

When I came home I did put him into a jug of water and he grew puffy and pale, with distorted features that reminded me of Frankenstein's monster. I feel in some way responsible for this. He has a large, bulbous head and (as you can see) a fragile little body as though he has had trouble incarnating properly. He never stood a chance because he was only ever someone's idea of a joke. Lucky for him and me that I have faith and believe in the redemption of almost everything, including miniature rubber psychotherapists.

We celebrated the birthday of Mr. Signs with a bash at Signs Cottage on Sunday. It was lovely, but I knew the only way I could manage the day was the three-stage approach of alcohol, caffeine and drugs. It sometimes works well (and did on this occasion), but one pays afterwards and I am paying. And driving my mother and her partner to and from hospital because of an eye operation he had has quite taken the stuffing reserves out of me. The sheer awfulness of NHS hospitals in this country is something one is surely never tired of writing about or relating but I am in a similar condition to the bleached-out rubber shrink and just about as good for anything. We are keeping each other company.

Shrink to Fit

Mr. Signs and I both see shrinks though we see different people and decided to go for different reasons. He is training to be a T.A. psychotherapist and has to do this as part of his training, and I have – you know – issues. For him it’s turning out to be a rich adventure. For me, it is a strange journey over uneven terrain and the landscape always changes. I see a psychoanalytic therapist and they work differently to T.A. people. For starters, there is no such thing as a “contract”, for mains he doesn’t talk that much and to boot he is into the idea of making it up as we go along. This probably sounds like a very expensive bad idea but, having seen more shrinks than you’ve had hot dinners in the past six months, I feel I have landed somewhere or other and reckon he is the real thing – for me, at any rate. I know one is supposed to fall in love with one’s therapist but I want to make it absolutely clear that I have no intention of doing that. No, all I want is for him to be perfect, like god. I’ve told him this and he nodded so that’s settled.

Meanwhile, I am waiting to hear from a certain magazine that I have won first prize in their annual poetry competition. This will be a big help in paying the shrink fees which, although I’m getting sessions at a knock-down price, are not inconsiderable, especially as I’m to start going more than just once a week. And then there’s the petrol money, all the way to Brighton and back, and the fact that now I’m doing this there is even less possibility of my doing any Proper Work for the foreseeable future, apart from a spot in the summer and an ongoing thing for which I shouldn’t really be paid, but hey ho. I have decided to turn the novel-that-is-no-more into a prize-winning short story; and I have begun on something completely different that doesn’t yet know what it is but it is a trickle that may become a rushing river, or it is a cave that may be filled with gold and silver, I don’t know. I’m making it up as I go along.