| The Water Lilies: The Two Willows, Claude Monet, 1915-26 |
Last winter, in early January, I found myself in Paris. Now I find myself living in Oxford. By chance I visited the Monet exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie: The Water Lilies. I almost didn’t go, having set my mind on the Bacon show at the Pompidou Centre, or just on walking about the city, which as ever was having its way with my heart.
Now, in Oxford, I find another city which, with its hawkishness (something shared with Paris), its money (the same) and its brutal divisions (more of the same), opens itself to me like a work of art. I love this honesty which is usually so absent in life. Far too often I have found kindness and care to simply be covers for the darkest kinds of folly and violence. It’s better to be able to sense it all, the whole kernel of a place, on one walk about. Or as with a person, on one encounter. Freud said not to forget first impressions, which is probably a good way of trusting them.
I have found too many places and people like Boris Johnson: a hearty scruffiness on top of an angry and frightened heap, a way with language that flashes only to give to an impoverished sense of surface-clinging.
In Oxford, as with that last trip to Paris, I notice something about water. This is one wet place. Everything seems to be under its influence: rainwater, the unendingness of mists and fogs, and rivers and canals that suggest those divisions I mentioned before.
The academics go about their work like agents of estates, literary or scientific ones. That’s not to say this is a place lacking writers or scientists. There may be a few. But Oxford’s a place that makes money, which is something an author rarely sees.
Keats’ tombstone reads: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. You may find him mentioned here, in Oxford.
I’m looking at the light fall on the wall opposite me. It feels like something out of time, in me. It looks like a familiar patch of light.
Yesterday I watched some old cine-films of members of my family and me from fifty years ago. I still feel the way that we moved and the intensity, but only if I don’t reach for it. It has to come to me, helped by music on this occasion.
What am I saying?
What a strange gift from my mother and her camera, no more secret.
| We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold, Jeremy Deller, 2013 |
After we have realised something about ourselves we feel different. Our sense of who we are changes. Time, rhythm and intensity feel different to us. Our proprioception changes as we find our place in the world, physically, emotionally: a relationship to the ground beneath our feet, and to who or what we love or hate.
When I work with people, especially using EMDR, I find it so important to try and recognise how different life feels for them after treatment without lapsing into treating this change as something metaphorical, or purely psychical.
It’s a real thing. We feel ourselves occupy space differently, less affected by past experiences of space.
There is nothing, of course, peculiar, about DH Lawrence having worked in Croydon Library, or Wilfred Bion having thought his thoughts in Croydon, or Camille Pissarro painting streets in Norwood and Sydenham, or Vincent Van Gogh living in Canterbury (or for that matter his describing falling asleep under a tree on the outskirts of Canterbury) – apart from how peculiar it felt to realise these things when I discovered them, while I was living in those places. I grew up just outside Croydon, and have lived for many years in Canterbury. Finding these things out brought them oddly close to home: they landed, peculiarly. They stopped being instances of other people living out their great lives in the world and somehow located them in relation to me.
Such is narcissism. As long as one remains with the odd feeling a lot can grow out of these wayward discoveries. Thriving on the energy of a supposed connection, an imaginary one, can be a driving force like no other. Reading a deeper significance is a problem. As soon as ‘meaning’ creeps in, and a movement occurs from the imagination to what might be real – what something means; its ‘real’ value – we take a step towards a very unpleasant form of control. The relationship was meant to be, and so this means something special for me … so it might go.
The peculiar feeling of coincidence means nothing, but can make much happen. It’s like the energy from a smile meant fo somebody else. These coincidences I have described, the events they contain were lived out by people who no doubt had someone special in mind: a reader, a looker, a thinker, a lover. There’s no doubt love and meaning in these events.
Sleeplessness confuses me. Sometimes I even seem to have slept but feel as if I haven’t. There’s a barrel of neuroscientists out there telling me why and how this is, but the only help I’ve really found in getting me to sleep so I feel as if I have slept came from a rather older, more arcane consideration of sleeplessness. I shall come to that in a minute.
Michael Eigen alerted me to Bion’s thoughts about what is ‘undreamable’. Thomas Ogden wrote a wonderful paper about supervision, and how the inability to ‘dream’ a client leaves analytic work shattered, deflected, and turned back on itself.
I have lately been failing to dream past a terrible fear. I’ve felt this, and experienced the edge of whatever it is in my dreams in my feelings upon waking (I have dreamed awful nightmares). I’m raw, exhausted, weak and irritable. the following day after non-dreaming like this, my nightmare being like the terrible guard to an unspeakable room, I have been so anxious I might as well have been waiting for an assassin to strike. My breath has been short, every small sound like a klaxon.
Something has found its way into me. A stab from the past, of which there are a few, underneath something happening now. I’ve come to understand that ignoring these mini-psychic storms is a bad idea. There’s usually something in them: something exposed thanks to my oversensitivity to certain kinds of trouble, a kind of a fault-line trailing back through the last five decades. But whether this is something I can do anything about, or something I even need to be concerned about, and sometimes it is something I simply have to accept, remains to be seen.
What I do know is that the ‘trouble’ will not let itself be seen in my dream.
The trouble, plus the remains of my past troubles, lock me out of dreaming. My mind may not go, for example, to the cradle-like rocking of slow wave sleep in which the memories registered over the day just gone feed into my memory. Trouble stays fresh in my mind, in my body, of course making no distinction between the two (it always, irresistibly knows best). Trouble is like water from a leaking pipe. It finds its way into every crack of your home. It saturates you.
I sleep without proper sleep and I wake up haunted by the enormity of all this trouble. It will always be bigger than the past on its own, or the present seen in its various moments. It’s an aggregation of all kinds of things: memories, sensations triggered by these as my system propels itself to fight, to flight, to freeze; chemicals; discomfort as my body fails to renew itself overnight; the perils of hoping those who love me understand my panic, my anger when I blunder through tomorrow only part there when the ‘thinking me’ has hardened and refuses to feel lovingly, however much I wish he might. You can’t go into battle full of loving care.
But I am not going into battle.
That last thought is the one that took me out of sleeplessness. It reminds me how much time I have. Time, rhythm, intensity, space, these all change when my awful old ghosts, revenants, are activated by some trouble in the here-and-now.
There were three steps out of my sleeplessness.
1: Understanding all I have written here, in my own way.
2: Yoga before bed, leading into diaphragmatic breathing. The breathing began with an out-breath, not an in-breath. No shoulder movement.
3: I slept the whole night. I dreamed. No nightmare. I woke feeling myself, no racing heart, no anxiety.
The next day I went for a long walk. Things felt so much better. I realised what I needed to look out for. The past felt in the past. The present and the future felt possible, exciting even.
