I am back from St Petersburg, although I needed some Valium to get me home – the experience of getting through their customs always feels like there is a risk of being despatched to Siberia: so many computer buttons pressed, sighs and turning of pages before comes that welcome thud of the stamp. Not a smile to be seen. At least I might then get to know Khodorkovsky, who was once the richest man in Russia. Nobody in the Kremlin minded as long as he was rich and corrupt, but once he wanted to start using his money to make humanitarian and democratic political changes, rather than to buy football teams, he was sentenced for life. Imagine, being incarcerated in a Siberian prison for life, without access to justice, although I think the European Court of Human Rights managed to insist that he has access to books. Khodorkovsky, a starkly handsome and wonderfully intelligent man who had an epiphany that he wanted to use his wealth to bring about democratic and political changes. Enter the hero who realised that there were also virtuous things to do with his wealth. He, alone, perhaps would have been charismatic and powerful enough to challenge Putin. Don’t ask me why, but he is one of the few human beings that I have never met, although I wish I had, who is under my skin, or inhabits my heart and some small element of his incarceration is also mine. I grieve for him. ‘What miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard?’ A prophet of change sentenced to a freezing death.

Portia, I do not now have many good things to share with you about the St. Petersburg where I have returned to after four years absence, nor do I want to bore you with distant politics when I know that neither of us are naturally political animals. The city has changed. It is no longer vibrant with hope, intellectual energy, easy money, the children of oligarchs and affluent tourists. It has become a grave yard of hope and poverty. The rich Russians – for whom the empty Milan style fashion boutiques were stocked – have left for London, Paris, even Spain and Cyprus. The grand hotels are empty, the restaurants display grandiose menus but when you try to order there are few dishes available. Even the huge esplanade outside of The Hermitage was deserted. Where are the tourists? It seems by the conspicuous absence of luxury coaches that the tourist operators have lost confidence in a safe passage.

The Saint Petersburg Times, an English speaking publication reported that last week when Protesters  hired coaches and wanted to depart to Moscow law enforcement officers forbade all but one coach to leave. Something may be rotten in the state of Saint Petersburg…Propaganda surges. Students tell me that the wish of their elderly parents now is for their children to find a way to the US or Europe. Only the institute where I teach seems still to be flourishing under the indefatigable energies of its rector, Mikhail Reshetnikov.

The city’s fabled packs of stray dogs, like many of its citizens have grown despondent. And hungry. Not only do dogs travel by the metro but they have learned to imitate humans and to cross roads at the zebra crossings. When I first went to SPB maybe fifteen years ago, its civilised packs of stray dogs were honoured, even loved. Then, they were benign and still handsomely fed. In a city that has lived through a siege and famine that its elders still remember when they were forced to eat domestic animals and feral ones too, it afterwards became a source of respect and ritual that the stray packs were fed and watered. I am told, that now there are regular television advertisements warning the citizens that the dogs have become an environmental danger and a decision must soon be taken whether or not to cull. In Istanbul they found another way: stray dogs and cats are visibly tagged to indicate that they have been inoculated against rabies and are safe to approach. A city where neither citizen, nor tourist can any longer enjoy the intelligences of its famous and fabulous dog population is not a happy or safe city.

I found it odd that when I woke, rather later in the mornings than I am used to – as you know I am an early riser, often up with the pre-dawn bird twitter, still too early for song – not to speak to anybody. (In SPB I was teaching late and often did not get bed to bed before 1 AM. I was surprised to find I can still do late nights, I might even manage a club with you Portia, before my dotage … I became an instant commentator on the psychology of Francois Hollande and even got some perspective on the Euro crisis as I found myself watching world television into the early hours.) I was going to observe that if you are used to waking up next to your husband and a couple of energetic dogs, it is strange to wake up and for several hours have no reason to use your voice. I think that is one primary distinction between living in company and living alone. I observed that by mid morning when I was ready to order breakfast my voice seemed to have disappeared into my chest and came out hoarse and jarred, which left me wondering what it might be like to wake up and to have lost one’s voice forever.

Beside the breakfast menu there was a pillow menu. Although I was not about to complain about my goose down pillows, it still intrigued me except I needed the assistance of a pillow translator to understand it. There were pillows filled with ‘pinewood flakes’, ‘Igocell’ pillows, what kind of cells are they I wondered, and ‘natural buckwheat pillows, sea-cell active’. I might also request pillows filled with ‘unique cellulose fibre made of eucalyptus and natural buckwheat pods’. Almost nutritious enough to satisfy the dogs.

White Nights are approaching, which traditionally are the busiest time for the city’s tourism, and a time of jubilation for its inhabitants and while I was there darkness only fell at midnight when exuberant children were still cycling around the square. Coming on the shadows of the recent elections the collective mood, if not the light, remained sombre.

The view from my sixth floor windows across St.Isaac’s Square to the cathedral was the highlight – with the exception of the joys of renewing acquaintances with my friends at the Eastern European Institute – of my visit. When I was not teaching, or talking to old friends, everything important that happened to me happened out of the view from my window. It was a small miracle that I could still see the cathedral as so much of the city’s fabled eighteenth century skyline of architectural majesty has been obliterated by the corruption of cement. The glorious onion skinned domes of the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood where Tsar Alexander 111 was assassinated alongside the river Neva are now concealed by some corrupt anomaly of Titan, not Titian, commercial redevelopment and bribery.

But this cathedral is too large, too dominant to obliterate. Whole forests were decimated to provide 10,762 tarred pinewood piles which were driven into the marshy ground to a depth of six metres to provide long-term stability beneath the chosen site. This was allowed to settle for a few years before construction above ground eventually commenced in 1818. However, this was not for technical reasons, other than Russia was disrupted by the Napoleonic War. On top of the treated wood went a compacted layer of stone to a depth of seven meters and over the next three decades 300,000 tons of granite and marble were assembled to complete the exterior of the building up to its final height of three hundred and thirty three feet. Most of the external construction was complete by 1842, then another sixteen years were spent decorating the interior before the grand opening in 1858.

The hotel that I am staying in, The Astoria is regarded almost as a museum (cf my previous blog) and it was built in 1912. I do not know what was standing on its site previously but nothing could equal my bedroom view of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. To begin with I looked out of the window and thought if I was Proust what might I create out of this aperture of light and architectural mass, of May blossoms and perspective. I squeezed my eyes and tried to compress my sight into linguistic experiences but I felt uninspired and talentless. Clumsy too. Just like when I watched the mercurial fingers of that inspirational genie of SPB, Maurice Janssens conducting Thus Spake Zarathustra last week at The Barbican. I gather Janssens has not abandoned the city, where he has an irreplaceable library  of manuscripts and musical scores, and few of its artists ever do. Not willingly.

‘I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here— a sign of unparalleled respect— because they are still capable of living by it.’

Osip Mandelstam

I studied the sculpted facade of the Adoration of the Magi and wondered how its sculptor had come to terms with the fact that very few people would be privileged – as I now was – to look across at the work horizontally rather than craning their necks from below, skywards. I saw that the bas relief of the baby Jesus, reclining in the folds of Mary’s lap, was as large as an overgrown man and the Magi were giants. This portico is crowned with mighty bronze pediments weighing approximately eighty tons which were ornately sculptured by Ivan Vitali and Francois Lemaire.

Words failed and for a moment I thought what a pity a lorry ran over my Iphone, which fell off my lap as I got out of the car just before I left London because I could have saved myself the humiliation and have taken you a photograph. Then it struck me that my exercise in looking rather than recording meant that possibly this view would be imprinted on my brain to eternity. No wonder I always find holiday snap shots boring and quite distinct from historical pictures of people’s families, (people I care about that is) which I find addictive viewing. Sometimes, I suggest to my clients that they bring pictures from their family of origin to our sessions. Family of creation pictures tend to fall into the holiday snapshot category. I was still demoralised that – even though I know you don’t care for Proust, Portia – I was unable to produce anything even a little magical. Later on that night something happened.

I came back to my room rather earlier than on the other nights. The day and the light had been unlike the day and the light of any other day that ever existed, as all days must be. I do not know whether what then happened, happens whenever that sensation of light is replicated, or whether it has never happened before, or whether the reason when I asked my friends and colleagues if they had ever had a similar visual experience, which they had not, it was because I was privileged to be looking out from a private window with a view from the sixth floor of a building with an unique position and inaccessible perspective. Or whether it was only my vision.

I was looking out of the open window and debating whether if I slept with it open, having been such a spectacular day, the Petersburg mosquitoes would appear. Can somebody tell me where they were incubating on all the previous cold days, just waiting for one day of sun after the unseasonal May glooms to arrive in my bedroom. To begin with my eye was caught by a strange feature across the roof tops: despite it being eleven PM an exquisite white crane, a mechanical one, was still gliding relentlessly back and forth across the skyline. While the Mayor of Saint Petersburg has all sorts of new prohibitions on his production line, now sliding towards the Kremlin, health and safety is not one of them. Buildings must be built, and most of these look like the unhappiest new buildings on earth. Slave labour still exists in Saint Petersburg where man’s life is cheap as beast’s …

I have never felt the same towards the Hermitage despite its stunning collections since I learned that thousands of slaves dropped from its walls like mosquitoes when Catherine decreed it had to be finished within days and huge chemical ovens were brought in to dry out the damp plaster. Documentation records that Peter the Great built the city with slave labour and at a cost of 200,000 lives; no wonder cranes work on day and night. Life has always been dispensable in Russia and once more I am reminded that suffering rather than happiness produces genius.
(Was Picasso, who lived with powerful psychological and material opulence, and who died a living legend, an exception?)

Mother Russia seems to be progenitor of both dictator and genius mentality. My friend and interpreter pointed out that Oblomov is not only famous in Russia for not getting out of bed, just like your brother, but also for his sado-masochistic relationship with his servant Zarkov which is another facet of both the Russian psyche and its history. Or perhaps I have put that the wrong way round and it is Zarkov’s relation with his master that thrived on sado-masochism.

Oh, Portia I am sorry to have written so much and I hope you wont find it all boring but I still have not told you about the golden experience I had from my room with the privileged view. My eyes were distracted from the gliding cranes towards the fatigued pinks of a dying sun. And then something numinous happened, and don’t worry if you don’t know what the word means because it took me a long time to understand it. A ‘peak experience’ will do almost as well. Yes, I peaked as I looked across at St. Isaacs Cathedral – which is built out of a mixture of grey mottles of granite and darker marble stone, with Corinthian columns carved out of a neolithic red granite – although time’s scythe has blurred them into a muddied brown. The extravagant edifice of the south portico and those sombre grey tiles had transformed into rosary pink, which had nothing at all to do with lasers or human technology. I was looking at a Proustian cathedral of Tiepolo pink magic. I can only imagine, as I know nothing at all about geology that some invisible crystals minerals were embedded inside of each mottle grey marble slab, which might act as a magnet to draw in the refractions of this miracle of rosary pink and marbled light which was now streaking the horizon and caressing a dying day, or do I mean night. Even the drab and weather battered columns had bartered colour and were now stroked into hues of cardinal and burgundian wealth. An indomitable and mottled grey building had turned into vulnerable pink light.

Something happened on a specific day in May, (May 15th 2012) which had been preceded by the dying of the light, months of snow, new prohibitions and darkness. Today, the sun appeared for the first time and citizens spilled out of the darkness and walked bare limbed in the city until a midnight sunset crept beyond a steely jungle of new-mixed cement and a forbidding cathedral was transformed into that most symbolic and versatile of colours. Proust pink.

Portia decided she didn’t want to go to University and she is working night and day, day and night for a film company in Charlotte Street, where she has discovered what the meaning of the verb, ‘to work’ really is. She is often – unlike her brother who rises at noon and only begins seriously to focus at dusk –  up with the blackbird chorus and only home long after the sun has set. Last week she told me that when occasionally she has nothing to do at work she has been reading my blog, I didn’t know that she knew I had one,  and that with the exception of Proust which was not her  cup of tea, and I understand why, she has felt drawn in and engaged by my writing to all sorts of new thoughts…

I cannot imagine anybody giving me a better gift, and it has certainly helped the iceberg to thaw.

In the interim between leaving and returning I am posting for Portia an earlier experience of my work in St. Petersburg and like Portia the Russians all know how to work, when I was privileged to visit the most notorious and ‘luxurious’ psychiatric hospital in Russia, the Bekhterev Brain Institute.

Portia, I hope, on my return to be able to provide you with a more light hearted read… especially as the women of St. Petersburg would not be seen dead in a snow boot but promenade St. Isaacs Square in Christian Louboutin seven inch stilettos. Well, those of them that have money, the rest are vulnerable, if not to being run over by buses, to being dragged along beside them when their impatient drivers barely stop. And then there are the dancing, oops I mean the chained bears. I have to close my eyes but I can still hear the clunk of chain,  and the risky business of hitching random lifts to Nevsky Prospekt and the Institute in the scruffiest Skoda and Lada cars, which you just hail down,  but with warm hearted drivers, for  a handful of roubles.  And, I thought I might even try to find the time to look for a winter leather coat…

WARD SEVEN

I am returning to St.Petersburg to give a series of lectures at the Eastern European Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. My host is Mikhail Reshetnikov, an ex-military general and physician who persuaded Yeltsin to return psychoanalytic psychotherapy to an official status in the national medical curriculum after its demise by the Communists in 1927. Reshetnikov now presides over a stylish eighteenth century building on Bolshoy Prospect that Yeltsin gifted to him, which hosts a refurbished training institute replete with the largest psychodynamic library in Russia, a Dream Museum, and an annual intake of over 100 postgraduate students. Psychoanalysis was forcibly liquidated in the 1920’s and officially no forms of psychotherapy existed in Russia until 1975: neurosis was classified as a typical feature of the decadent West. By December 2000 there was one medical psychotherapist per one million people.

During this visit I intend to venture out from the ‘good city’ and find out whether it is true that even in the big cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow, medical psychotherapy falls far behind the collective national predilection to consult witches and mages and whether the Russian youth have become vulnerable to cults. Genuine healers come assorted and state accredited, along with all sorts of quacks and criminal charlatans, who use varied miasmatic techniques to brainwash their audiences into spending thousands of hard earned roubles for the promise of a quick fix. The Russian mentality – borne out of eternal struggle for survival – has become nationally addicted to the consoling idea of ‘a quick fix’. It seems that a new age occultism is fast becoming the religion for many Russian people. There are about 25,000 psychiatrists and psychotherapists in Russia versus 300,000 legally certified magicians and healers! There are more than one hundred state licensed schools for magicians throughout Russia.

In addition to an expanding occult industry the country is spawning more and more pseudo religious sects that are becoming increasingly irresistible to a floundering population, which is not yet skilled in the architecture of psychological individuation. Between the Russian Revolution, with its suppression of individuality, and Glasnost the average Russian had scant opportunity to develop a sense of personal agency or autonomy: the Russian personality is still adolescent in its explorations of subjectivity and the sources of self. Jesus of Siberia is not a national joke but a 42 year old prophet called Vissarion – a former policeman from Minusinsk – who claims to have 80,000 devoted followers, many of whom have followed him to an ecological settlement on an icy Siberian mountainside.

There are at least 500 different sects in Russia with well over one million followers of which the majority are young people. What disturbs – in particular – is that some of these so called new religions are commercial organisations with a ruthless focus on power rather than religion and a totalitarian mission of transforming the Russian psyche according to their own rules of political conformity.

Traditionally, Russia has been a country in which cults, correctly referred to as new religious movements, have flourished. Amongst the intelligentsia, pre-revolutionary society spawned Masonic rites, table raising séances, court orgies, theosophy and the phenomenon of Rasputin, another Siberian peasant. Rasputin, like Freud, was fascinated by hysteria and the powers of hypnosis. Freud applied himself to a theory of sexuality whilst Rasputin became an expert in sexual hypnosis. That was at the core of his impact on high society women, including the Tsarina, who were culturally susceptible to the mysterious arts of hysteria. Rasputin, like that other Siberian trickster, Vissarion, thought of himself as Christ and made others believe it as well. Both had innate origins in a cult which beckoned the Russian sexual revolution, the khlysty, a romantic sect that combined assiduous piety with sexual promiscuity. In their youth the future leaders of the Soviet intelligentsia, such as Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lunacharsky were as influenced by Dionysian energies and Nietzsche’s vision of Superman as they were subsequently to be by Marx. In rural Russia magic and religion have always co-existed. Siberia, along with its mystical birches, has incubated generations of Shamans. Under Soviet rule it was rumoured that the KGB, scouring Russia for psychics to assist in their extra sensory perception researches, searched the forests and mountains of Siberia for mystics and children who displayed precocious psychic sensitivities. They forcibly recruited them into research projects for ‘Higher Nervous Activity’ at flagship research institutions like the Pavlov Institute in Moscow.

In a country that no longer knows what – or who – to believe in, whose people are floundering in an ideological void, there is an innate predisposition towards any authority that holds out the combined promise of prosperity and emotional containment.

Of particular relevance to my specific interests in Russian mental health is Scientology’s vast propaganda machine, which is fuelled by their generic hatred of clinical psychiatry. Of particular concern to Russian politicians should be the fact that their leafleted attacks and pamphlets carry truth in their squall. Russian psychiatric services are now at an all time low due to negligible budgets and the fact that state national insurance does not have any cover for mental health. Outside the major cities most of the acute psychiatric hospitals have reluctantly degenerated into primitive vehicles of restraint My medical colleagues tell me that in the provinces psychiatric hospitals are often deleted from the state budgets altogether. Many hospitals cannot afford modern pharmaceuticals and the older technologies like insulin, and the primitive equipment that is still being used for ECT are more likely to kill patients than cure them.

Officially banned, L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology is still alive and kicking in Peter’s great but confused city: it is alleged that its steely long arms have embraced senior Russian officials in both capital cities. Vladimir Agishev, director of SPB’s largest mental hospital has described how Scientologists disseminate huge quantities of leaflets attacking psychiatry as evil and the patients as prisoners. This is nothing new in terms of scientology’s politics but the consequences of its propaganda will be different in Russia where the current state of mental hospitals makes Chekhov’s shocking account of psychiatric care in Ward Six almost seem homely by comparison.

Arriving at my hotel the manager comes to greet me: This is my third visit this year and my eighth to his hotel. Good and bad news awaits me. The good news is that my room has been upgraded and the bad is that in the last week about forty guests have been mugged with varying levels of physical brutality. The muggings have not taken place down a cul de sac but outside the hotel whose boundaries are marked by private security and a legion of minders, who seem to turn a blind eye to everything except their bosses’ BMWs. The manager confides that it is the gypsies and that he is beginning to despair about the fate of his beautiful city, that several tour operators are threatening not to send future guests. The Astoria is one of the most beautiful hotels that I am acquainted with. Built in 1911 it was where Hitler planned to sign and celebrate his Russian victory. It is also where the revolutionary poet Eisenen slit his wrists and scrawled his dying name in blood on a banqueting wall.

Tomorrow I have plans to visit the Bekhterev Brain Institute that was established under Vladimir Bekhterev – another army general – in 1907. It was the august Bekhterev who first identified Rasputin as an expert in sexual hypnosis but his promising diagnostic perspicacity came to an untimely death after he was invited to give Stalin a consultation in 1927 and diagnosed paranoia. Surviving for only one day after this event, the Kremlin physicians diagnosed food poisoning! The Bechterev Institute is still privileged to be the country’s flagship of neurobiology and psychiatric research. After the emotional warmth, intellectual energy and aesthetic refinements of Professor Reshetnikov’s Institute, I am taken by surprise to arrive at a building, which has become so environmentally hostile that it has driven many patients to suicide and where only its most indefatigable psychiatrists have escaped, burn out.

My host Rada, Medical Director of the Outpatient Department of New Technologies, and President of the Russian Federation of Medical Psychotherapy: a man in his mid forties, with a prophetic beard that rivals his founder’s, and burning eyes, is one such triumph. Rada’s eyes, and professional devotion to finding ‘new clinical technologies’ – Russian’s are still addicted to technology – seem to me to be one of the few beacons of light and hope in a therapeutic space that has become as desolate as Sodom and Gomorrah. I find it hard to conceal my incredulity as he explains that included amongst the inpatient community there are affluent people who pay large sums of money to be here.

We pause outside a locked ward where a stern notice dictates to all inmates precisely the rations that they are allowed to bring along: all forms of salt, homemade preserves and pickles are, to my mind, illogically forbidden. As we enter I have a sensation of déjà vu: The windows are disfigured on the side with iron bars. The floor is discoloured and full of splinters. The place smells of sour cabbage, unsnuffed wicks, bed bugs and ammonia, and this picture of smells at first gives you the impression of having entered a menagerie. The words are Chekov’s but I feel as though I have walked backwards through a looking glass.

Originally the ward must have been designed to facilitate sedation through its naive deception that patients were accommodated in a country dacha, or turn of the century Swiss sanatorium. Ravaged by time and the absence of any budget for restoration, it has shrivelled into a crumbling set that has become the stage for an unintentional theatre of cruelty. Mere shades of their former three-dimensionality,

3

personalities now wander aimlessly between nothing and less than nothing and I feel that I have entered an abode of the living dead. Most of these shadow-selves lie on their overcrowded bunks in heavily sedated and catatonic rows.

The ward psychiatrist makes a brief appearance from his internally locked office and explains, not without pride, that a policy change has been instituted whereby they no longer have any wards, just informal dormitories, but these are dormitories from hell. I still haven’t seen a nurse anywhere and I experience a sadness that extends beyond words. Whilst he is talking to me I am aware that a woman is booting his door in suspended agony, imploring entrance to discuss the fate of her suicidal adolescent. Unlike my host this ward psychiatrist, who sports a deaf ear, speaks immaculate English but his eyes are like cold fish; their only commonality exists in the animation of their cigarettes. Russian men, and they don’t even need to be psychiatrists, never seem to tire of making jokes about their addiction to smoking and its associations with oral deprivation at the Soviet Breast.

As I am led to another dormitory the psychiatrist explains that ‘These people are acute suicides and require a 24 hour watch’. Nobody there to watch them, still not a single nurse to be seen, nobody therapeutic anywhere; and besides these patients are definitely too sedated to move. The only redeeming feature is that the electro- convulsive therapy treatment room looks reassuringly non operational. One principal clinical difference between this flagship institute and the provinces must be that it still has a budget for twenty-four hour sedations.

It is no wonder that the ward psychiatrist has eyes as dead as fish, no wonder that in a society that pays its medical professors less than 200 dollars a month, he is in a crisis of existential despair. No wonder that no experiences of human suffering will ever surprise anyone who works, or tries to work here, again. No wonder at all that the Scientologists are onto a winning wicket with their anti-psychiatry pamphlets. Not at all surprising to any of my companions that I breathe a huge sigh of relief when that dreadful parody of a chalet door is unlocked again and I am reunited with Rada’s quizzical eyes and his offer of a constitutional lemon tea heavily laced with cognac. I am inspired that Russia still has philanthropically motivated doctors like Rada who, despite their profitable and thriving psycho-sexual private practices in the city’s’ centre, also continue to toil and trouble in this wasteland for a reformed vision of state mental health-care provision. As we prepare to depart Eliot’s words float into consciousness: ‘On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing’. This really is a world without connection.

On our way out of this baneful yet nationally prestigious institute – to which I have had privileged access – whose principal detail of aesthetic décor seems to be provided by a tracery of mice droppings, we stop at cluttered kiosk, such as you might find beside any metro station. This is the pharmacy and because medicines cost money it is attended to. It looks more like a wizard’s booth and prescriptions are clearly optional! When I ask whether the pharmacist has any Prozac for me Rada and Mikhail Reshetnikov laugh, light up, and shake their heads but they are the misinformed. Prozac she has indeed; just like vodka, cigarettes and software you can buy it cheap, even though it is a powerful mind altering drug which, when improperly imbibed, can transform depression into florid mania in a matter of hours.

The citizens of St. Petersburg make no secret of their distinction between the ‘good city’ and the ‘bad city’; tomorrow I am going to the Northern district of the ‘bad city’ to an old cinema to watch so called ‘folk healers’ perform. Remember, this is the country which, in the late ‘80s, an influential psychiatrist called Kashpirovsky transported himself into a populist hypnotist who managed to hold the nation in hypnotic thrall through the television screen.

I wake up to an autumn day that would make Wordsworth proud to be a Russian: the roads are silvered in a film of ice and my ears begin to freeze as soon as I enter St. Isaac’ Square to catch sight of a school crocodile wearing its homogeneity like an uniform. I realise that a sight of national physiognomy has become an anachronism in London where any large group of children come as assorted as Smarties. Almost all of my Russian friends found it hard to accept that my grandchildren are mixed race. Amongst the most liberal you often find that the African students – who were imported into Soviet universities – are still blamed for causing the Russian HIV epidemic, which will soon implode and explode the country’s inertia and denial into crisis. When I am in Russia my worst thought is that I will need to be hospitalised and require a blood transfusion.

Today, my translator and confidant, Lara is taking me across the city to visit a former Soviet cinema called Prometheus where we will witness the nationally esteemed folk healer Marina and her adept in crime hypnotise their audience into fiscal submission. More than a hundred, closer to two, old and not so old citizens are gathered in this derelict and unheated dump to be hypnotised into health. Soon the unbelievable will happen before my eyes as this patch-worked community offer up their hard won roubles in return for worthless talismans. I already have no doubt that this couple are neither mages nor folk healers but criminal charlatans who know how to work the collective mentality of a crowd of people whose lives have been scarred by famine, loss, sickness and multi-layered political betrayal. Most will have lost a son, or grandson – here or there – to one war, or another. But I am surprised by the absence of any attempt at presentation: they appear dressed by courtesy of a Russian equivalent of Primark. At the very least I had expected charisma with lashings of Russian soul and more smouldering eyes.

A rusty blaze of sound announces entry: there are no lighting effects, nothing to see except two drab individuals climbing onto the stage and receiving adulation and bouquets of flowers from arthritic men and women who struggle to be the first to offer their cellophaned tributes. Now I see a man and woman whose aura whiffs only of indifference and contempt. Without any attempt at folk habiliment – but lost in moth-eaten fur – the self-professed healer, Lady Marina begins to read her poetry. One ditty follows another until my embarrassed interpreter whispers ‘Frankly this is terrible poetry, let us leave’. I remind her that she didn’t bring me for the poetry but to witness a social phenomenon that happens all over Russia every day amongst a needy and neglected layer of the population which is still too confused to make a distinction between religion, cults, and collective hysteria. Marina’s companion, dressed in a polyester track suit, announces that he is the grandson of the great holy man Gramma Njura: not only can he cure his captive audience but he can also assist all the absent members of their families with his talismans. “Just like the great God Prometheus I can change your destiny.” This is something that no one in this audience, or maybe most of Russia, any longer believes that their politicians,

doctors, military forces, scientists, or national security can do. Njura’s words carry seduction because their promise is of effortless gratification – the nationally longed for quick fix: rewards will be instant; or almost instant and no one needs to do anything at all because Njura possesses the spiritual key to a bio-energy to make all things possible. Energy, one should know, is the second most popular national word after technology. His rhetoric is dissolute: ‘If you haven’t heard from your grandson since he entered the army and left for Chechnya you need only sprinkle a few drops of holy water on his pillow and he will return by the end of the month.’ Sometimes they do! Most commonly as numbers.

The lights go out with a fearful hissing and we are plunged into a darkness that smells like more sour cabbage as the corrosive sounds of attempted sea rhythms now herald the climax of performance. Our polyester trickster Njura behests us to gather a citizen in our arms; to rub away grief and renew bio-energy. Rub! Rub harder and harder! The dark auditorium is alive with the electrical energy of strangers rubbing up a tornado of hysteria, delusion and denial. The light returns and I am amazed to see that the audience has been transformed: a group of cold and hungry strangers are looking towards their seducers with expectant eyes of the newborn. Can it really be so easy to hoodwink and seduce? Are these brave and resilient people who have born so much suffering, so much hunger, really going to bite the bait of illusion before my eyes? Surely such easy believers would prefer a church; but then I realise that prayer demands effort, uncertainty and patience to wait for that eternal reward and that there are no overnight guarantees on offer. In this ghastly cinema the illusion is not on the screen but in front of my eyes. Two greedy queues are forming on the stage and former hobblers appear quick on the hoof. One group are waiting to be blessed with poetry and holy water and the other group, already baptised in collective deceit, are frantically buying the talismans from the holy descendent of Gramma Njura.

The poet Osip Mandelshtam said that it was only in Russia that politicians thought that poets were worth killing. Come to think of it, during almost a century of the political suppression of agency and self, it was left to the poets to burn that counter- revolutionary candle of conscience and subjectivity. Anna Akhmatova, in her poem Requiem, which was banned until after her death, wrote: ‘Beyond the circle of the moon, I cry/Into the blizzards of the permafrost: Goodbye. Goodbye./ In those years only the dead smiled,/Glad to be at rest:’.

Can it only be in Russia – amongst the best educated people of the world – where physical existence literally depends on the acquisition of primitive survival skills, they can delude themselves that doggerel and water contain magic and bio-energetic energies that will bring back their lost boys from Never Never Land? Roubles are falling everywhere, just like the first snowflakes of the season that await me, as emotionally drained, but not financially ruined, we fall out of this corrupt atmosphere that now resounds to an Onegin chorus! During our long, ice blown walk to Lara’s home to eat blini and newly pickled mushrooms we calculate that in the course of one hour Marina and Gramma Njura probably filled their coffers to the equivalent of 1,500 US dollars, not bad for an hourly wage.

It is early evening by the time we return to the Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies and the building has warmed up; the austerity of its marble entry hall is complimented by crystal lighting. Startling nude studies recline the stairs and beckon

towards the main teaching area as if to alert all those brave enough to enter that their task is to unmask psyche. The corridors are alive with the buzz of postgraduate students who have come on from their daytime employment. Fashionable looking individuals cluster out onto the pavement: despite the rigour of the freezing elements they all appear bright eyed and enthusiastic as they shed layers of outerwear and prepare to commit themselves to a seriously long evening of post- Freudian theory and applied psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Many of them are already employed as senior clinicians in mental health services, some are professors and others grown-children of the new affluent classes. Teaching is conducted in formal classrooms with blackboard and chalk.

It is only now – after the recorded events of the day – that I begin to realise how extraordinary the presence and philosophy of this thriving training institute EEPS is and how much its founder and rector, Mikhail Reshetnikov, has contributed to national psychological understanding in the last ten years. He is also a frequent traveller between Petersburg and the Kremlin where he is Consultant to the First Chamber of Russian Parliament. In November he was awarded the official title of Personality of the Year – along with the Nobel Prize winner and academician Jores Alpherov – for his services to the development of Russian psychoanalytic psychotherapy. As always in Russian politics you are either a national threat or absorbed into its mainstream: middle ground remains a neglected concept.

Later on, my lecture delivered, we warm up with vodka, obscured in a tsunami of exhaled cigar, beneath the inscrutable gaze of a lithograph of Freud’s Monday Club, while Mikhail Reshetnikov explains more to me. “I was never a conventional military man and my friends were surprised that I served for twenty-five years, but my primary contribution was to the psychology of trauma and terror. Then, I was invited by the Mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoliy Sobchack, who was a very popular political leader, to work with him as the Chief of his Analytical Department which led on to my own idea to set up an independent institute. I was only interested if it was for the development of psychoanalytic studies. The idea just seemed to emerge out of a dream; it was 1991 and a period of intellectual intoxication: great ideas were in the air. However, when I said that I wanted to establish an institute of psychoanalysis, I was told that it was impossible. To begin with I had to compromise and it was established as the Institute of Medical and Psychological Problems and only later we changed its title to The Eastern European Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. Fifteen years ago psychoanalysis was unknown to Russian medical psychotherapists and psychiatrists but now it would be impossible to have a psychotherapy conference without its presence as an academic discipline.”

Over dinner other colleagues explain to me that it is no longer the authorities that pose a threat to the expansion of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Russia but the collective mentality, which has become addicted to the idea of ‘a quick fix’. Russians are weary of waiting and this contributes to a national predilection for magic and the seductive uniformity of cults where everyone knows what they must do next to maintain the promise of equilibrium. My colleagues express gratitude that I have strayed beyond the civilised confines of the Institute to see the nether belly of their city. They explain that they sometimes find it difficult to reconcile themselves to classical European techniques of psychoanalytic psychotherapy that were not sculpted out of a psychology of famine, and the other unique political pressures and crises of identity that a vast proportion of the Russian population – those who are

neither the poorest nor richest citizens – are heir to. Growing more confident, these accomplished Russian professionals are also becoming determined to combine their desires for international clinical fertilisation with a distinctly Russian passport that will also address itself to the cultural specificities of the superstitious Russian psyche. It is inspiring for me to observe – each time I return -more and more graduate psychotherapists have set up shop in svelte clinical consultation centres.

Psychotherapy – under Reshetnikov’s influence – has already become a profitable and desirable profession with accredited qualifications that reflect European standards. Its skilled practitioners are still busy competing with national predilictions for occult alternatives that state registered quacksalvers continue to peddle but in St. Petersburg it is turning into the preferred treatment for alienated and impoverished professionals and the ‘New Russians’ alike.

I do not want to leave this extraordinary environment and go home. The only compensation is that I will stop smelling like the Russian equivalent of Galloise and will have to give up the appealing habit of cleaning my teeth in vodka.

THE TUILERIES, Paris.  COPYRIGHT JOHN HAYNES 2011

I found myself taken into the life-worn and immaculate workshop of a carpenter, in a Liverpool industrial area, who had custom built and fitted wooden doors and windows for new buildings. An exacting and precise craft. Rather that is what he used to do, and although he looked like a pensioner but perhaps he was prematurely worn to the bones with stress, that was what he still wanted and still needed and still could do. I have not been able to put his hang-dog dejection, nor his workshop with its metallic precision of polished and blood warm tools and surgical implements out of sight. If I was Seamus Heaney I might want to write a poem, or if I was David Storey, a novel,  for this man, so skilled and outlawed from trade, seemed to me to  embody all the dying poetry of  artisanal  England.

A pause to reflect on the word artisan, which is how the French still refer to their local rural builders, and which embodies the word ‘art’ which is not reduced to utility.  Manual skill is art, it can be living poetry and this man with his weak eyes stained by permanent tear, where perhaps once a star had spun as he swung his hammer, and who with his complexion now stained raw by blood pressure was still in every cell the artist in his workshop where every tool had its own hand-worn placement of apprenticeship to the wood.

Yes, His act worships itself.

What disturbed  most was that this man, I choose not to use his first name in a wanton intimacy, like other men interviewed in the programme, did not require thousands of pounds to stop his house being re-possessed, his workshop lost, only some hundreds. Why do ‘we’ need a government and the bureaucracy of  urgent and unpopular tax reforms for those of us who have enough, or even too much, or much too much.  ’Oh reason not the need ‘ Lear  declares, to inspire ‘society’ to give up just one habitual luxury to prevent our ‘neighbours’, some might say the working classes from losing their homes and being cast out onto that unchanging heath of homelessness. Homes which the programme told us, within a matter of a year – or in some instances – still more tantalising, months would have become owned but which were now in the steely hands of repossession.

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

If the ‘Big Society’ means forming circles of virtue and reciprocity, giving receiving and returning, then I’m all for it but how to start? No, I don’t need anybody to tell me, I can if I choose, get on the phone to Citizens Advice in Liverpool and ask for some advice…

Post Script, April Fool’s Day:

It is not possible to make any contact because the CAB bureaus are so  overwhelmed that they don’t accept emails or phone calls. In Liverpool, rather like our local Waitrose deli, I have discovered that you have to collect a number from a slot in the  wall which tells you where you are in the queue. When there are no more numbers available it means that you must come back the next day and queue again, presumably earlier. Since becoming concerned about ‘repossession’ I have just read Pessoa’s definition of Romantic and I think Blake and Will Shakespeare, at least in some of his moods, might have gone with it:

The fundamental error of Romanticism is to confuse what we need with what we desire. We all need certain basic things for life’s preservation and continuance; we all desire a more perfect life, complete happiness and the fulfilment of our dreams…..

It’s human to want what we need and  it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering our lack of bread. The Romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could be obtained.

sympathy

1570s, “affinity between certain things,” from M.Fr. sympathie, from L.L. sympathia “community of feeling, sympathy,” from Gk. sympatheia, from sympathes “having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings,” from syn- “together” + pathos “feeling” (see pathos). In English, almost a magical notion at first; e.g. in reference to medicines that heal wounds when applied to a cloth stained with blood from the wound. Meaning “conformity of feelings” is from 1590s; sense of “fellow feeling” is first attested 1660s. An O.E. loan-translation of sympathy was efensargung.

Copyright 2010 Cornelia Hartman

We didn’t make it to Paris so we are going to be eating salad instead. I adore this image which a client – who comes for professional development gave me permission to display – and has just sent to me as a metaphor for the conversations we have continued to have together for rather a long time. I also love Shakespeare’s metaphor about emotions being like a salad but I am not referring to Cleopatra’s ‘salad days’, I’m sure there was something more subtle about emotional combinations somewhere in A and C. I’ll have to keep on thinking and finding.  If I’m really stuck I can check out with Greg Hicks who has currently opened in the RSC season, which has transferred to the The Round House, in advance of going to New York, where he will be playing in ‘Lear’. His is a great and thoughtful Lear, it may not have the age of  the other current Lear but it does have great complexity and trickery. All traces of the mannerist Greg have been pared away, and who speaks better Shakespeare?  He is also the Soothsayer in Antony, and I had quite forgot, until I saw an excellent review in the papers today, that he has just opened in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ as Leontes. What a fistful, if not a salad bowl of emotions to juggle there. Surely, Leontes’ flayed and phantom immersions into those green eyed monsters of jealousy must have prodded at Proust in his immortal autopsy of what is possibly the most primal, when additionally linked not only with bodies but with territories, animal emotion.

The queues outside of St. Pancras Station looked as though they were for the ‘last train’. Undiluted chaos. At first I thought the people were queuing to see an exhibit at the British Library, at least two blocks away from the station, until I noticed that they were all carrying suitcases.

I know this won’t be popular but at the moment I’m finding Dorothea, who hasn’t yet departed for Rome, irritating and my sympathies are with Celia’s intuitive intelligence. I have also been castigated by ‘Prof’ for finding Norpois boring, and not understanding what Proust was doing. But, even though I knew that he was mimicking a salon style of parrot gratuity, and even though I think I knew that to some degree there was a conscious mimesis of Proust’s own syntax, taking place, I failed to ‘laugh out aloud’. Still, on the next reading I promise that I shall try to read more acutely.

I am also struck, watching my grandchildren’s turbulent and exquisitely painful experiences of ‘first love’ along with the liberties of adolescence, by what a terrifying business this encyclopedia of love is. What tremors, what annihilations, what sobbings of self do any other experience, except the challenge of death, throw into the insomnium of night. Or, is it all no more than ‘romance’: ” My lords if you would hear a high tale of  love and death…’?

My daughter tells me that I am naive; that it is because she understood all these scarred, or do I mean sacred, woundings of adolescent love, self-harming, body piercing and possession that she originally determined as a therapist, also to work with adolescence. Yes, love speaks with a warlike language, and all along the way, it twists, if not strangulates from desire to death, with passion. The God of Love is a blind archer, a magician of  projections, who only ever shoots fatal arrows, and his rites de passage seems to agony between one besieging and another.

Now that I cannot people watch in Paris, I don’t have any excuse not to meet the challenge of the contorted thoughts, digressions and arrogance of Denis de Rougement’s,’Love in the Western World’, whenever Dorothea exasperates me, and once I’ve found that Shakespearian metaphor of emotion…I’ve checked with the Concordance and it doesn’t exist. Must be another bard. I do like this:

‘Indeed, sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or rather, the herb of grace.’ Clown

Dan and Rose June 2010

Grandad, the 80's

‘Grand Dad’ to book for dinner. While I’m happy to stay hotel-home, eat club sandwiches with Portia, and people watch. But she’ll no doubt want to go clubbing with her mum. In fact we’ve all agreed to go clubbing together.

In a way I rather wish I hadn’t started re-reading ‘Middlemarch’ before we are due to go because whenever I am properly committed to reading a novel, which isn’t that often, other than when I’m re-reading Proust’s ‘Recherche’, I become anti-social. I’m finding with ‘Middlemarch’, and I cannot remember when I last read it, that although I do not have any memory of the plot at all, my brain still seems to know what is going to come next, not in advance but only page-by-page. I have no idea what will happen to Causabon, but I rather think he will have to die, and with any luck he wont return from Rome. I don’t know who bores me most: Causabon or those relentless foreign policies of Monsieur Norpois. Only last week I should never have dreamt that Proust’s ‘Recherche’ would drop off my linguist-deaf tongue – or rather my pen in such a languid manner – as I should never dare pronounce it, but since my Proustian partner managed to inveigle me, except he doesn’t inveigle – and would I think detest the word – anybody into doing anything. But, it was through his magic that I ended up, far less reluctantly than I could, to begin with, have imagined, doing a gig on Proust at the Royal Society of Literature, and being privileged to hear Christopher Prendergast and Ian Patterson jousting over whether Proust and Art were, or were not life savers and could, or could not, redeem the Time. And, just for your benefit Christopher, oh heavens I can’t even initial your surname because they both start with ‘P’, so just for your benefit Prof, I don’t believe in Redemption either, well not through Proust, nor Love, not through anything except perhaps Individuation and the Self.

I have been struggling, wading or fumbling into the pages of Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougement. His thoughts are dense and intense and it’s easy to give up the effort to think these sentences through. But twice now he’s thrilled me and most recently it was with his elucidation, via Plato, of the original meaning of the word, ‘enthusiasm‘. It seems that to be enthusiastic is to be possessed by the Gods, I love that thought and get it because at the same time it fires another unthought thought in my head, and my sensory memory confirms it. When I am enthused about something I’m inhabiting my environment, I’m being fed by the universe and the mortal world is enough. I sparkle and my enthusiasm might even be contagious. The other thought is that when one stops being enthusiastic, one is, if not sad, depressed and I have been trying to figure out for a long time what might be the opposite of depression, which I often elucidate to my clients as losing desire for the world, and that explains to me why enthusiasm is so irrepressible and when something is irrepressible, whether it’s my dogs enthusiasm for her walk, or my irrational devotion to my dog’s feelings, it means that repression is absent. And, repression, whether it is anger, or denial, or love, yes we so often repress our love in the fear that it will not be returned is a broad walk to depression.

My enthusiastic dog, Lucy the Viszla in Regents Park, 2009. Copyright John Haynes

Finishing Finding Time Again on Friday was traumatic and I’ve only just recovered from vertiginous sensations of inspiration and despair at my own mortality. I think that the first time around I read the masked ball sequence I couldn’t have been ready to embody – and that is what Proust asks his reader to do, to embody and not observe or applaude art – the physical impact on my own descending mortality of Time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour. How can one read Proust’s dissection of mortality without Shakespeare’s monument to time chiming into consciousness?

Proust makes it clear that there can be no escape from the masked ball of time and organic decay and it’s my guess that he would see our present day obsessions with Botox, liposuction and cosmetic lasers as futile cul de sacs of vanity. Although, that’s not to say he might not have recourse to them himself. As he describes, the longer anyone remains looking ‘Good for their age’, the worse is that final descent into their failure of helplessness, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything. Yes, everything, except perhaps time, wears out.

Oh, Heavens, I could write for hours on my experiences of reading Proust but I wanted to write about other things, like falling in love, even in its non refulgent state, with the young maple sapling my landscape gardening friend, Special Branch bought me last Wednesday. Its full name is Acer Palmatum Westonbirt Red. When Special Branch left Westonbirt Aboretum he told me that the sapling was still in an open-leaved crimson glory. He had a shock when he opened his van for by the time they had made the short journey to London its maple sensibility had been compromised and its leaved tendrils were contracted into what might be described as an arthritic screetch of bruised agony. 

Its demise provided me with an example of what Proust is always writing about: ‘because at that moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law, which means that one can only imagine what object is absent’. Now, I could not perceive, but only imagine, what my sapling had looked like before it went into shock and I shall have to wait for another year to pass before it finds its time again.

I don’t think there’s going to be much time today to write about finding the experience of things, but I have almost caught up with my Proust reading partner who has embarked on William James, The Variety of Religious Experience without waiting for me to finish Proust, (and it’s possible that he only finished first because my handbag was stolen and I didn’t have any reading glasses for a week and my brain anyhow felt like punctured seaweed).There are two thoughts that have come to me from James’ first lecture. First of all I should declare that even though I am an experienced psychotherapist I am also still a neurotic, but in Proust and James’ company that’s no bad thing to be. And, there is a caveat: I am a conscious neurotic and it’s in unconsciousness that the cliff falls of much of our un-deciphered neuroticism and depressive sufferings reside.

I adored James’ image of religion as a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: ‘Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee, my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with the roaring all night long; as the heart panteth after the water brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God.’  And, as James goes on to say, the foundation in many non-Christian countries of all religious discipline consists in the regulation of inspiration and expiration. It might also be true to say that these two involuntary and mainly unconscious acts are, when brought into mindfulness, also at the foundations of psychological health.

We can never escape our breathing, after all it’s the first and last thing that any of us ever do, our greatest commonality, and yet too many people expend their lives forgetting that they breathe. Not only is its perversion the loadstone of James’ metaphor, its health is also the foundation of any meditation. In the search to understand beyond the mechanics of consciousness more and more neurobiologists and psychologists are being drawn towards the study of meditative practices and the conscious orientation of our bodily dimensions. Children need to be taught how to orientate themselves in space, to use their body compasses of cognition. 

Perhaps, we need to return to Leonardo. Of all of Leonardo’s known discoveries, his discovery of the cause of heart disease through a build up of cholesterol could have saved millions of lives. This would have happened if his discoveries were ever taken seriously at the time and published by his peers. Leonardo had worked out that a substance carried though the blood and produced by what we eat imbeds itself in the arteries and blocks natural blood flow.

Like Proust we need to remember to look forward and backwards. 

Ligeti  has drawn me, or rather my Proustian partner who inducted me, has inadvertently drawn me to the surreal dramatist Michel Ghelderode.  I have been trying to memorize his name by imagining that I am riding a geldered stallion, along with Keats’ Bright Star, and hope that I have got the spelling right  and then galloping off  to Amazon Prime for the catalogue of James Ensor who was as fascinated by Carnival and Masks and Love and Death and Anxiety as I am, except Ensor painted them and I try to get behind them….many of his works remind me, and are I think, indebted to Goya’s black paintings. (Retrospectively, I also feel that Paula Rego must feel indebted to his visceral imaginings and teasing.) I wish I knew where those black Goya paintings are hidden as so few of them are displayed in Madrid, unless they are stored away in unnamed archives.

Even before these artists, discovered  by courtesy of my  Ligeti-trail, came  as a gift into my vision I was intending to blog about Carnival and the Death of  Tragedy, and Rio de Janeiro, and my Capoeira thrusting Berimbar drumming friend Greg Hicks whose life embodies Carnival and who next year will be playing King Lear at the RSC, and then another unexpected pleasure, to revel in the fact that Rio and not Chicago won the Olympic bid, which is what made me think of Greg because he has a flat in Rio at the foot of  the statue of Christ the Redeemer …  but for now I still need to absorb and metabolize rather than write.  And then last night – at my grandson, Dan’s direction – I watched the documentary Gonzo and discovered the death driven genius, the carnival energies, the insight and death-sight. of  Hunter S. Thompson, the beauty of Johnny Depp, and  today I am still more undone and I don’t,  after watching the inspiring and fittingly minimalist staging while listening to the frantic and god-like desires, demons and visions and woundings, or should I write wounds,  of  Tristan and Isolde – with my Wagnerian loving/ Proust reading partner – where nothing remains black or white, but returns to shadow, have much to spare.  

James Ensor: Pierrot and skeletons.

The mobility, the anxiety and the waivering of his nature explain at once the feverish searches,the steps forwards, the steps backwards, the brusque advances and the sudden retreats, in a word all the unevenness of his art. Emile Verhaearen, 1908

The Intrigue.

And Self Portrait at top of the page.

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are -changin’.

Bob Dylan

(I  much prefer Dylan’s version to Larkin’s poem.)

 South Bank, John Haynes copyright 2009

Statue of Mahatma Gandhi: Tavistock Square, London. (Copyright John Haynes 2007)

Quote of the week:  ”I don’ think life has a meaning beyond what we put into it. It’s like vision. I mean one only projects colours onto objects – they’re not, of course, themselves coloured -one also projects meaning onto things. If you look at a painting, the viewer is projecting his own meaning into the paint, whatever the artist wants. And ditto with an oak tree; whatever God or Darwin decreed for it, you project meaning into it.”  Richard Gregory


The lineaments of Gratified Desire
.

What is it women do in men require
?

The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

William Blake

Until I started writing this blog I thought I had memorized this quotation years ago and that Blake was right, although he was a gnomic who never quite meant what you think. But, I’ve just found out, after many years to my shame that firstly I didn’t know what lineaments were – I thought they were linty and comforting bandages – worst still that I had substituted a ‘most’ for the ‘do’: What is that men and women most require…which has dented my blogging because I was going to argue that what ‘we’ most of all require are healthy levels of self esteem, and the courage to be ourselves. I’ll come back to that after my desire diversion.

 Despite these reported lapses, I have worked out a paradox of desire, or perhaps that’s not true, I’ve worked it out in conjunction with an absent friend who’s still watching seals on that distant seashore and pondering the meanings of the universe, which is that the essence of desire’s compulsive energy to connect is met, no not met but fulfilled in the obstacle to its connection. Gratified desire is doomed – sooner or later to become dead desire, or domestic desire. It is the obstacle rather than the object that fertilises desire.

In the romances of archetypal lovers like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis and Achilles and Patroclus, desire is challenged by separation, suspended and then immortalised by death. I find Venus and Adonis the most tragic scenario because of its lack of symmetry between the lovers and because Adonis is adolescent he feels himself to be invincible to danger and as immortal as Venus. It’s still true that it’s the most original, beautiful, brave and intelligent adolescents who wont listen to their elders. (Which brings my grand children Dan and Portia instantly to mind.)

This paradox of desire is true of Amaldova’s  latest and perhaps greatest – although I have heard as many say his least successful – erotic testament, ‘Los Abrazos Rotos’, or ‘Broken Embraces’, where the collision of obessional desire(S) are suspended and then ruptured by violent acts of  sex, death and blindness. Here, there is no light; except with Almodovar there always is more light, but I don’t want to write a review of Broken Embraces although I am still thinking of little else, except that Penelope Cruz’s symphonic Spanish beauty stops me thinking at all. (Her Hollywood performances don’t work so well outside of her mother tongue, which enhances her sense of timing and wit.)

A link between Coriolanus and Almodovar’s film is that they both reveal the suffering of men whose parents have refused to recognise them, let alone love them for who they are. Isn’t that what we all desire most of all, to feel that we have been unconditionally loved.  Or is that just another unrealisable myth that keeps us in a state of longing. There is so much unconscious narcissism in love.

In my ‘Mother’ blog I talked about the elusive elixir of self-esteem, which I would identify as the lubricant of becoming oneself, and which is almost impossible to manufacture artificially. Some few do manage it but if you miss out on feeling unconditionally loved in childhood then it’s a lifetime’s work and hard going all along the way.

I’m drawn to the observations of ethologists, who were inspired by the ideas of Conrad Lorenz when he uncovered the concept of an ‘innate releasing pattern’ to explain our instinctive behaviours which are often only accomplished at specific life stages and afterwards become notoriously hard to recapitulate.

It’s one of the great wonders of life that self- esteem is so vital to human wellbeing and yet it is so often absent even where you would expect to find it. Success is rarely related to self esteem, but often grows out of its absence and an inflated desire to get the zeitgeist to prick up its ears in compensation for the absence of a more private gleam of admiration in the parental eye.  

In ‘Broken Embraces’ what I understood to be personal clues from Almodovar’s life are barely concealed within his maze of imagery;  an underplayed moment of personal pathos and revelation was costumed in the geeky  and sexually ruined son of the tycoon Ernesto Martel, whose life is fuelled by revenge for  humiliation at the hands of his father for being unworthy of his loving embrace. That’s why unconditional love matters: it is the antidote to stunted emotions. And then, I thought of Almodovar’s compatriot Lorca and his torment at disappointing his father and then, how astonishing it must feel to grow up knowing that you are unconditionally loved, and then how terrible it is to know that so often, but not always, because nothing is for always, that broken embraces are so easy to contaminate one dysfunctional generation with another.

And that is why learning how to live and love matters more than anything.

Quote of the week:  He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.  For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars. William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’ 111, 55: 60-8.

Coriolanus’ fall from hero to exile is caused by a revengeful narcissism, which makes him seem arrogant rather than vulnerable when – victorious in battle – he refuses to expose his wounds to the marketplace as custom demands. (You can find descriptions of his wounds in Plutarch’s Lives but not an account of his relationship with his suffocating mother.) Shakespeare was not keen on mothers: often they are most present by their absence. He doesn’t manage ‘a good enough one’, let alone a loving mother, anywhere. I’ve just thought of Queen Constance in King John, but she must be the exception. And, there’s Hermione but she’s too vulnerable. When I think about Coriolanus’ inability to expose his wounds it provokes other thoughts in me, which cluster around differences between concrete acts of self-harm and psychic equivalents. It’s common for some adolescents who self harm to bear their cuttings like jewelry, at least when among their peers. I’ve just been reading some Chaucer  with Dan and in the commentary I was much intrigued to read that in the early Medieval period it was commonly regarded that body cutting was a means of enhancing spiritual energy.

If one is positioned to talk to adolescents about their self harm they will often explain that seeing their blood run free gives them a sense of being alive, (often in contrast to feeling emotionally dead) and that allows them to feel empowered. My daughter Tanya is a psychotherapist with extensive experience in working with self harmers. I was once listening to her give a public lecture and at the end one of the mums asked her what was her most frequent piece of advice. Quickly, she replied, ‘Don’t interfere, don’t over-react and make sure you have lashings of lint, antiseptic and plaster visible  in an accessible drawer.’ I’ve had little professional experience of physical acts of self-harm although it is not a phenomenon limited to adolescents and more often it’s the boys who carry it on into manhood.

I will never forget Princess Diana disclosing – if not revealing – her self harmed thighs on Panorama. In fact she was probably doing it for her mother who left Diana comforting her small brother when she disappeared from their lives without warning. Diana probably went on invisibly crying inside for her mother all her life. Diana’s mother filed for the custody of her children but then her own mother, Lady Fermoy testified against her and in favour of her husband and an enforced reign of terror began. Diana was crying because she was abandoned and didn’t know why and Coriolanus was crying because he was impinged on and both were traumatized forever.

One of the saddest things I’ve read was when I was editing a book on Diana’s death, and I read her will online in which her last will and testament reinvests her mother’s authority: ‘Should any child of mine be under age at the date of the death of the survivor of myself and my husband, I appoint my mother and my brother Earl Spencer to be the guardians of that child and I express the wish that should I predecease my husband he will consult my mother with regard to the upbringing …of our children’.

 Flesh wounds can heal in a way that psychic wounds although invisible, often do not. They have the capacity to eat their way into the brain, through people’s lives and erode their self-esteem. It’s true that some words are immortal and it’s usually the insulting ones. There should be a recipe book for cooking, bottling and pickling the elusive essences of self-esteem. Absent mothers, wronged mothers, impinging mothers, blind mothers, vain mothers all suffocate their young. It’s a more sophisticated form of what other animals sometimes do. But, who doesn’t long for the mother of  their dreams, and maybe a few even have them. After all even Peter Pan never stopped wanting one.

Harold Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

Copyright John Haynes 2006

All his life, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrestled with numerology, and he held an intense fear of the number 13. (For example, he named his unfinished opera Moses und Aron , instead of Moses und Aaron so that the title would have 12 rather than 13 letters.) A certain discomfort stemming from his birth date, September 13, haunted him, and indeed intensified during his later years. Perhaps he foresaw that he would die at age 76 (7 + 6 = 13, a fact not lost on Schoenberg) on Friday 13 July, 1951.

Quote of the week: William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1:

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

Like harmony in music; there is a dark

Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles

Discordant elements, making them cling together

In one society. How strange that all 

The terrors, pains and early miseries,

Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused

Within my mind, should e’er have born a part,

And that a needful part, in making up

The calm existence that is mine when I 

Am worthy of myself.