What a rigmarole it is being mentally ill. Today I need my mother to drive me round to Barrow-in-Furness for bloods and a health check. Tomorrow I need to walk more than a mile to the beach to meet a mental health professional as part of my “reactivation”. The day after tomorrow I have CBT to try and help my illness. It’s all a stress. I mean, when I have to do something the next day I have to go to bed on time, and the spare time continuum of my writing freely is interrupted. It’s probably for the better that I do have things to do, but very often I cannot sleep if there is an appointment the next day. I believe meanwhile I can say these things but shouldn’t open up about the illness itself online. Luckily, last night I did sleep and woke early today, but the thought of leaving the house makes me anxious.
Now the rain starts to fall… I was just about to say the weather is not too bad today, then it started raining. I think about the creative writing MA at Lancaster for which I had a place once upon a time but not the funding, then sneeze 3 times as a truck passes. This you might call “status life detail” which is one of the 4 ingredients that according to Tom Wolfe are common between the novel and creative non-fiction. So I do still remember bits and pieces of my degree. Another shared ingredient is “exhaustive research” but what the other 2 are I cannot remember.
Last night I was reading Ethics by Spinoza but fell asleep very quickly. He keeps making you turn back the pages in the middle of a sentence to reconfirm a previous proposition, so it is slow going. I like the way he often takes his cue from Descartes though is diametrically opposed to him when it comes to the mind and whether or not the mind is part of the body (for Descartes it was separate but not for Spinoza). I might be able to provide a big book of philosophy myself. At least, I have a file containing maths, science and philosophy. I suppose the modern philosopher must deal with A. I, and that is why I am looking forward to Victoria Turnbull’s book coming out.
I sneeze again 4 times. We sneeze to evict unwanted particles of dust from the nasal cavities. Now I sit here and contemplate my literature, in particular the 5 collections I brought out with Chipmunka. If I were to make a Selected Works of those 5, that would be good, and I am already thinking about it, which ones to put in. I have on the go some other things too, which I have been talking about on this blog. One option is the book of verse for my family, with my family, but I don’t think my sister wants poems for her little baby girl to go online.
Recently, people have been making me write an Anon book which I wouldn’t normally do if it were me but I have applied myself to it, and called it Anon Songs For Luke B. Now that I have done an Anon one, it could be that I return to myself. This big book of science and philosophy and to some extent maths is the final frontier. It’s already more than 90, 000 words long, but that can change as can everything else.
I microwave the rest of yesterday’s pizza, make my mother a morning coffee and think about thinking some more. The rain has eased off; there are patches of blue in the sky. A lone fly investigates my pizza crusts. The fridge buzzes. My mind gets lost counting things, objects, lists and sets. The air temperature has cooled slightly of late. Rusty, brown leaves litter the front and back lawn. My kettle is boiling. My drip-feed of tea is continuous as a river. I turn off the lights to save electricity.
I was supposed to be listening out to the wind for instruction as to what to do with my next book, after the last one (Yes You May), and it said to do an Anon book. So I did, but it can’t be published as Anon because the publishers don’t do that so it must sit on my Blogspot page, along with other new work, and old work too. Having done that, the wind has allowed me to do one that is really me! Yippee I have two blank bits of paper I can fly! As long as it isn’t government science, I am free to do a new book and for it not to be Anon. It’s something to think about, a way of processing leisure to trial and outcome. My feeling is I need to finish Spinoza before I can settle down to philosophy, if philosophy is what I choose, and it might be, but it might not. It’s not for shiny things above the fireplace that I do it, but for something more, but what I don’t know. I am thinking of making it prose. At the moment the big file I mention is a miscellaneous variety of modes.
The world I face isn’t evil as such, but especially with the medication I am on, going back to bed in the morning, only an hour or so after you have got up, can seem the only option. Instead I will write on, like writing is freedom, as Martin Amis said it was. I may have mentioned in an earlier blog post that I found the witness’s city. That is, when I was reading The Lords And The New Creatures, which was Jim Morrison’s city, and as the witness too, I wrote one about the city, which was a novel that was abandoned after about 17 pages of A4. At the time I also had the Oedipus Wrecks set list which I think has now been made Anon, also a serial poem of 12 parts for a lass called Nathalie and called ‘The Greatest Sin’ which encrypts a node, also a suite of about 7 Anon poems from the school mag at Oundle School. After making a prophetic speech in the barn in 2000, I went down south and added an album recorded on binaural earphones to the Rimbaudian list. I got into Warwick writing a portfolio that said I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, which was never returned; and when I got to Warwick I wrote some further good pieces such as one CNF piece called ‘Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons’ about Paul and I dropping acid at a festival celebrating the solar eclipse. Before my mental illness I really had everything going for me. The piece about Lucy was awarded a First at University in my first year and there were other pieces of merit too. There is on my laptop a file called ‘Just Something I Used To Do’ in among many hundreds of other files – and it collates what remains of that early work, but it is too late to just deem it that, to just be a neo-Rimbaud. Still, I was a talented teenager.
I hope I haven’t lost it. I keep trying to make something of the witness’s city, incorporate it in a book of science and philosophy, or else make it novel, or part of a book of short stories, but at the moment nothing is final. I go take a look back at the file called ‘Just Something I Used To Do.’ It is ample, but too late. It stops at the moment of my illness, and yet since then I have carried on. Maybe one day that is what they’ll think of me?
I still haven’t won the Nobel Prize for the seven year old text that helped invent the net and attempted the maths of the new colour that I did with the government but they have already moved me on to an Anon one for Luke B, starting with an idea I got from my mum, who doesn’t wish to be Anon. I am skint, single, unemployed, mentally ill, medicated, living with my mother in the sticks, stuck without a car. I close down the file ‘Just Something I Used To Do,’ and get a text on my phone from EE saying my contract has expired, and am not sure if it is spam or not. In this modern and digital world I am a little bit out of place, though try not to be. I still have a laptop and phone, though never go scrolling in infinite space on that phone; and I am still on FB, and watch videos and listen to music on Youtube, and sometimes listen to Spotify on a Smart speaker. But I fell behind ages ago and cannot catch up.
**
Now it is later, into the afternoon, and I have arrived home from the health check in Barrow-in-Furness. If you can believe it I had 3 Big Macs while I was there – one when we arrived, which was my breakfast, then 2 on the way home. What a greedy guzzler I can be. The health check went well. I gave blood samples, had an ECG, answered some questions and stuff like that. I always get anxious though, going into town. Barrow is quite rough, though some might say because of the nuclear submarine factory, it is a city (in the sense that the sub factory is like an industrial cathedral). I went to school there, an independent day school, both as a child and in the last year of Sixth Form, though the school has changed since I was there – is no longer a fee paying school and has apparently gone downhill. Before I left to go to town today with mum, I re-organised my Anon poem book and made it much longer but am still living in fear. I noted on the way home anxiety subsided the nearer I got away from town and down the valley home. It’s an enchanting journey, heading for the sea but stopping a mile before you get there, down the valley’s curved heart continuum, to this little bucolic spot, in this pretty place. I suppose the subject is psychogeography when you’re talking about anxiety decreasing as you journey from an urban to a rural place. Likewise my old University friend used to say as we walked down the canal, back into town from the fields, swearing increases.
Martin Amis used to say any journey is a good short story; but (alas) I feel my day out would only bore you. I remain suspicious of mental health professionals. Tomorrow there’s another encounter. Tomorrow I walk down to the beach for “reactivation.” I used to be escorted but now am just meeting the guy there instead. Anyhow, I think I am supposed to be commentating on the game of art and literature as I create things. I amalgamated some files to make Anon Songs For Luke B really big, this morning, just before I left for town. So there’s basically only one un-published collection, the Anon one. I also have quotes from myself superimposed on photos on canva.com and some think that the best of me, but it’s only ever meant to be online. In terms of paperbacks there’s only really the Anon one and yes the one for my family too and there are large overlaps between those two, but the family one I am not meant to put online and the Anon one I can’t bring out as a book because it would have to be my name on the front as the guy that paid for it. My next stage is to take the overlaps out of the Anon book. This is difficult. One of the two or even both texts as in the family one and the Anon one could be ruined. Those that want me to preserve the family book know that it was Luke B that had me cursed; that I shouldn’t be listening to the guy; that his request for an Anon book is unreasonable. Who knows what political agenda these various voices have… so in the process of writing this piece things have gone backwards.
Now I have a 282 page-long file called ‘Unpublished Poems 2.’ It amalgamates the family poems for my sister’s baby girl, the poems I wrote in the style of Michael Hofmann I. e. the shape and texture of bricks, the Norman Nicholson style ones about place and Nature, then the Anon ones for Luke B, then the rest of my unpublished poems. In other words it’s a mess. I doubt even my brother could sort it out!
The voices don’t want me to do a book and even when it’s Anon make destroying it their remit. So I take down the previous draft of the Anon one for Luke, take down also Acid and Alkali Redacted, which for some reason was still up there, and sit here thinkingabout my freedom to write, sit here with a fat file containing almost all the unpublished poems and another fat file of science, maths and philosophy. So I really regressed since this morning, and apart from the ones superimposed on photos, there is no advance on the published work on the Blogspot page online.
So the next influx of sonic hallucinations tells me the best ones to go with – even though they are not here to read them – are the Anon lot – and that the place and Nature poems in the vein of Norman Nich are the throats of gloating toads. The family one is just for the family. The brick one is take your pick. The others are like lost former lovers. So I’m going to go with just the Anon poems for Luke B for now and cut them out of the big unpublished file, which means I will still have a big file of unpublished poems even once I’ve gone Anon.
For they could be trying to undo the curse, with the Anon poems. And if I am a bit patient I see there are five possible collections in the big un-published poem file including the Anon one… so they actually divide quite neatly enough. So now I sit here either with 5 unpublished collections or a single 5-parter. I would tend to go with the single 5-parter. Then hopefully I arrive at the Condition of Order.
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