Finals

THE FINAL EXAM THAT DROVE ME MAD. 
(3 hours. 3 years. A lifetime.)

• 1. 'and the Doctor said, "are you saying you feel guilty unless you are hungry?"
  Discuss, with reference to the roles of female c haracters in the American moderns, particularly  to Plath's representation of Esther in The Bell Jar , the relevance of this quote to your adolescent development. 

(10 marks)

• 2. Should a poet's work invariably utilise enjambment or read in sequence, allowing the poet freedom to let the poetry find it's own form?
  (Candidates are encouraged to explore the source to which the question above alludes, and to formulate an original argument with an effective use of rhetorical devices to communicate it,)

(8 marks)

• 3. Elucidate your role as a daughter, then compare and contrast it with your role as a student. Use quotes directly taken from personal experiences and your own examples to clairfy your explanation. 

(5 marks)

• 4. They are all looking at you and laughing at you. You are a joke. You are hallucinating and haven't slept in days. How does this make you/the reader feel and do you think this was a part of your plotline intended to elicit a particular response?

(5 marks)

• 5. Love is not unconditional. Discuss.

(10 marks.)

• 6. "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." 
• This famous quote by Nietzsche presents him as a nihilistic and misanthropic individual. Do you see him in this light or can you find hope in his hopeless stance? Use exAmples of your own suffering to corroborate your viewpoint.

(8 marks)

• 7. Is morality a prerequisite for appreciation of art? Are you? Are you appreciating/appreciated? Discuss.

(10 marks).

• 8. Calculate the 369th digit of pi as the fractal proxy to represent the infinite worlds contained witin each human being, and in doing so determine the contribution that you and the offspring you will most probably never have cannot contribute to the world shared between the infinite number of individuals posessing their own words, continuing on to deduct your own value from that of the mean value of the population considered in this infinite data set and draw up a graph to visually demonstrate the extent to which the world doesn't need you.

(15 marks).

• 9. Using the individual calculations formulated in question 8, derive the meaning of Y.

(5 marks)

• 10. Draw the shape of your sadness

 (20 marks).

• 11. Don't you think you should have learnt by now? 

(25 marks)

• 12. Explain what you are hoping for, and substantiate your hopes with empirical support.

 (5 marks)

Fairytale of London

A duet with William Nein doing our own slightly slurred version of my favourite Christmas song (other than O Holy Night, which I find a tad wordy and not far enough on the secular side)- Fairytale of New York- and a video to it, with a few clip of how this year I spent Christmas, peaceful, happy. I am not big on Christmas. I don't see why we can't spread cheer every day instead of reserving it for advent and the few days following Christmas Day that allow for leftovers (edible and emotional) to be enjoyed before impending stresses of the New Year and that weird woman-only stress that I don't actually suffer from but has something to do with sales settles in. It's strange that we have such highly developed cortices and elevated cognitive capabilities but when it comes down to it we get excited by shiny things like tinsel and gratified by the food we permit ourselves to gorge on during this season.
Anyway, I'm not the Grinch, and I like carols and I like people decrating their homes and getting together and I enjoyed decorating the 10 foot tree at James' building with him and seeing the faces of neighbours when they first set eyes upon it. I just don't feel that strongly about the day itself. This year, however, was perfect. Homely, natural, fun. I cooked successfully. We watched the sun rise from Primrose Hill and I've never seen a day so clear.

LOVE

I have long been asking friends of mine, several of them, many of whom were eager and happy to help out with my art project (including men, even though the art project is T-shirt printing, which I have, as some of you may know, have been doing a few years now)- for old T-shirts that they do not use anymore. I ask them for blank, old t-shirts that are no longer wearable t them and they don't mind getting rid of. I don’t need T-shirts because I have clothes of my own. I can still fit into the clothes I wore at 13 and 14.
I refuse to accept myself as anything of an ‘artist’ or to describe myself as ‘creative’ (I don’t like labels- original, I know- and I additionally think human beings are fluid and always changing and adapting, on both superficial, observable physiological and behavioural levels but also on deeper, undetectable levels. Our surroundings and the environments with which we interact consistently alter the architecture of our neuroanatomical structures, promote synapse growth, form new neural pathways and, of course, cause cell degeneration, and that is a considerable force behind the chances we make cognitively and emotionally. The brain isn't everything- at least that's what I believe. Sure, it is the most complex thing in the universe that we, as human beings using brains as our tools, can ever try to understand and probably never will in its entirety, but I think that the experiential and psychological changes that we undergo through our lives are not purely the result of amendments to the neural substrates of our behaviours and emotions. Anyway, I've massively regressed). It does not only seem strange to reduce a person to a list of character traits because it’s just that- reductionist- but it’s also frightening to me, and surely damaging to any individual who decides upon labels and wears them for too long, because people can go around for their whole lives saying they’re a this and a that and they’ve got this list of qualities, and surely that would hinder them from getting the opportunity to grow into and become and act like and think like all of the people they’ve decided they aren’t). And the most awful situations arise when you meet someone who is happy to tell you all about themselves, label themselves in numerous ways, and then fail to show any of their aforementioned attributes. Then there are the other terrible cases- those who smother you with their labels until you don't have a choice but to say yes, yes, yes, until you realise all they are doing is smothering you with little care for the person they are smothering or anything else but their labels. I've met very few people so bad, thankfully. Over the past few weeks, I have come face to face with actual human cruelty. Deliberate cruelty, which I think is the only thing that is unforgivable. But I have been told by a lot of people I’m creative. I once was told by my good friend Charlie I was the most creative person he knows, when I dropped into a conversation that I considered him the funniest person I know. I am/was flattered but I still don’t think I’ll ever call myself creative. Not until I’ve created something substantial or important. In fact, I won’t go around telling people I know who I am and this is what it is like.  Recent events have been pretty troubling, but I am sticking by my life philosophy-or one of them- that has kept me from turning bitter and cynical about the state of the world and the human race. The black echo theory- my flatmate of days gone by and myself- coined this term to describe a phenomenon collectively affecting all peoples in all societies, and we probably all have words for it and all know of it but it operates mostly beneath the level of awareness. In short, when someone hurts you, if you don’t either forgive them, get closure or settle without it, or just put down the load of resentment you are left carrying (the longer you walk with it, the heavier it gets), then this blackness- this dark feeling passed onto you by someone you know or a stranger or anyone- can start to release itself from you and pass itself onto others. Or you pass it on in ways you don't notice- below the level of awareness, this bitterness leaks out in, made manifest in your interactions with the world around you as what is eating you inside makes you hungry to start taking small parts of other people's joy perhaps, to feel a little better. Breaking hearts because yours was broken. The bullied become bullies. The abused become abusers. I'm thinking of a specific person now, someone who was once abused in a marriage, and somehow has become a vicious, intimidating bully. I am not saying abuse is forgivable. No abuse of anyone is forgivable if it is intentional. But if you can't forgive or forget it, you have to find a way to move on without those two luxuries. So you have to accept there will be no closure. No apology. Life isn't fair. Those who hurt us are the exceptions to the rule- I have to believe this and I do. I do not see the worst in people. I see the good first, I see even the potential good when there isn't any obvious good to see. I wait for the good. When there is bad, I give chances for things to be made good. Eventually, though, I run out of chances to give. This happened fairly recently. The aforementioned person- I am not expecting them to have forgiven their abuse. Of course that is not humanly possible. They were once a victim, but it seems that instead of accepting that their victimisation happened and that the world can be cruel but that there is a future ahead filled with people to love and filled with reasons to see so much wonder that that horror of the past can almost be obscured, this person took on the identity of the victim. They made this their whole life. They turned their tragedy into their identity, which I think perhaps a lot of people do, and again, I am not judging this. I understand the concept of searching for an identity to fit into if you feel hollow or hurt or confused or unsure about what your purpose is or who you are meant to be, who you can be, should be. I saw people in my group, as I mentioned in my last post, take on the 'BPD' identity role. Birthday parties with only BPD guests, conversation topics restricted to BPD-related content. I understand that is how people cope, but it frightens me, personally. The idea of letting my personality disorder become the entirety of what my self is made up of is terrifying. The idea of making myself a perpetual victim due to a situation in which I was victimised and yes, was a victim, is even more horrifying. Because that is letting the monsters win. When I was the victim, I had no power. I felt like an enormous part of what I knew of the world and myself and how to be and how to grow was lost. I was helpless, and for a long time didn't ask for help. But I am not a victim. If I were to spend my life framing my identity as the victim, I would still be powerless. There is one thing that couldn't be taken away from me, and that's my hope and love of people. I will not extrapolate from one or a few bad encounters to the rest of the people in the world. That is dangerous because it would mean I'd be going out expecting to encounter the bad, and this would be the black echo. Someone else would then cross my path, and the grudge I'd be holding might cause me to mistreat them or make them my victim, and then they would be the victim, and then do the same to others, and it goes on. This person has let the monsters win and take away her ability to be free- not just from the past, but free at all. She victimises others and I know the black echo so I won't let her echoes seep into me and begin to reverberate from me. I will stop the echo. But it scares me to see the black echo so clearly exemplified a year or so since the theory was conceptualised.

Anyway, the message of this post is that forgiveness may not be possible. I was sad to figure that out when I realised I couldn't forgive until I understood. And I don't understand the mind of the person who made me a victim at 17 and I don't understand the mind of the intentionally cruel. I therefore can't forgive, and I never forget because if you forget you don't learn from your experiences. But I don't need closure. I don't want it, even. I am happy with where I am and I am becoming happier with the person I believe I am becoming. I am not a victim. I am sorry for those who attack others to make themselves feel better, but it is the saddest thing of all that the attack can have happened decades ago and yet there is no letting go. Walking around with that much hate inside you, I am actually not surprised about the bullying behaviour. I don't even mind being a punchbag if it helps them release some of that hate, especially if it can somehow prevent their black echo from spreading too far and to too many others.

Back to the T-shirts, someone didn't read the entire message I texted saying blank old ones but generously gave me some new ones. When they started to bully, I decided to to the art project anyway. So in the image above, I sport one of the tops with the one word I would like to pass on: Love.

Borderline Personality Disorder

This gif is totally unrelated to the material below. It just entertains me.


Some of you may know that some time ago- when I was completing the first part of my Master degree- I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. It's not something I write about often, or talk about often, or really want to. Not because I am ashamed of it. If someone asked me if I have it, I would not be ashamed to say that I do. It's just that it's not something I would go around introducing myself with. I know that, by definition, personality disorders- of which there are 14 according to the newest publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders- are a specific class of mental disorders unlike sleep disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, somatic disorders, mood disorders etc., characterised by patterns of maladaptive behaviour, cognition, affect and inner experience that are enduring and exhibited across may contexts. These patterns are said to develop early and remain inflexible. Some say that they are associated with disability and significant distress. This is where I, personally, deviate. I will never say that I 'suffer from borderline'. I do not suffer. I made my parents suffer for a long time. I am still learning to regulate my emotional responses in certain situations where they deviate from what is acceptable because I am aware that my behaviour can cause suffering, especially for those who care about me. I am very lucky to have people who care about me. All I can say is that, disorder or not,  my actions are never intentionally carried out to cause anyone else harm. I am not going to whine about how I hate myself so much it's punishment enough. I am finished with my days of wallowing.

Now I'll just run through them briefly, for education purposes. The personality disorders are organised into clusters. This makes them a little more interesting, I guess, at least if you play it out in your head like a bunch of crazy characters with idiosyncratic off-the-wall ways of existing and bouncing off one another. Cluster A (the odd types) is comprised of these 3. Let's imagine them as characters.
Paranoid: irrationally suspicious, mistrusting of everybody, interprets people's motivations as generally malevolent.
Schizoid: not interested in social stuff, detached from others, no relationships, apathetic, doesn't express emotions.
Schizotypal: very uncomfortable with social interactions, does not like them at all.

Cluster B is where my diagnosis falls in. They are the erratic, emotional types. There are four types in Cluster B. The characters:
Antisocial: no regard for the rights of others, lacking in empathy, overblown self-image, manipulative, impulsive (sounds lovely)
Narcissistic: needs admiration, thinks that they are above all the rest and deserving/entitled to all, lacking in empathy too
Histrionic: attention-seeker, excessive displays of emotion
Borderline: pervasively unstable all over in terms of relationships, self-image, identity, behaviour and affect, often leading to impulsive behaviour and self-harm

Then there's Cluster C, the anxious and fearful types.
Avoidant: feeling socially inhibited all the time and feeling inadequate, extremely sensitive to being evaluated negatively
Dependent: pathalogically needy, basically
Obsessive-compulsive: rigidly conforms to rules, perfectionist, needs control to the point that they are excluded from friendships and other ways of having fun.

Anyway, after that short and informative digression, I guess I just wanted to write about it this once because it's not important for people to know about because of me, but it's important for people to know about personality disorders. I don't want to raise awareness or start claiming I get any special treatment. I didn't bring this upon myself and neither did anyone else. The causes are thought to be a mixture of genetic heritable factors and mainly averse early events. It was heartbreaking when I was in treatment because the majority of women in the group, myself included, had experienced traumatic events that had critically altered our lives. I am not about raising awareness or trying to claim it's something I should wear proudly. What I think is important is education.

When I started treatment- it's a very, very effective treatment called mentalisation based treatment- I was lucky enough to know how it works. It's not a talking cure and you don't have to sit there talking about the past and what it was that damaged you. For all anyone knows, it could be one thing, it could be a million things, or it could actually be nothing at all. Whatever it is or not, you have problems fitting in. You're making mistakes. You don't know why. You don't feel like a person so you act like a person but you're terrible at acting so you try and make your surroundings respond to you, to give you something to mirror yourself against. I happened to take a lecture in BPD and mentalisation based treatment as part of my neuroscience module as an undergraduate at UCL. I actually didn't think it had anything to do with me. Weirdly enough, I'd been sent to the university counsellor who had said the word 'borderline' to me, given me some numbers and books, and sent me away saying he could only provide 6 sessions and I needed long-term help. I laughed it off at the time. It wasn't until I was put into a mental health institution that someone wrote borderline on my health notes, which so far had been riddled with eating disorders and PTSDs. I still didn't get it. When I started the treatment, I was reluctant at first but soon I found myself in a room full of women who were speaking a language I understood and had been trying to communicate with my whole life, and nobody else I'd known could understand me. I was diagnosed with BPD so completed the full 18 months of treatment, and the reason I think education about such treatment is so important is because they work- if you understand them.

Mentalisation isn't a psychobabble word. It's also the name for a neural network in the brain that, among most people, operates automatically and without any problems at all. It allows them to infer the mental states of others, without assuming that they are absolutely correct and can read minds, without always assuming the worst, without taking their assumptions and turning them into their own destructive actions, and without neglecting them entirely either. People with BPD have a dysfunctioning mentalisation process. My whole life my mother had been saying, You are putting words in my mouth, and she had been right. The assumptions I was making were due to my lack of ability to naturally infer the mental states of others. I just can't get people by looking at them, basically. Isn't that almost tragically simple? When someone smiles at me, I think they are laughing at me. I take things too personally and I know it is irrational. I know these assumptions are not the truth. Now I know. Thanks to the treatment. I was taught what my problem was. I was taught how to see from other angles. It still takes effort and I 'mentalise' every day but it stops me from hurting myself so badly I end up in the funny farm.

Borderline personality disorder isn't something that I was diagnosed with and grew into. I have known people take on symptom, get worse, act out, use it as an excuse, claim disability funding. I am not going to turn into the diagnosis I'm given. I have made mistakes and maybe this explains some of them but it sure doesn't excuse them. 

The way I see personality disorders is that there is a societal order- some people are a few standard deviations away from the norm. We are the abnormal ones. The disordered, out of the order. In a few centuries, maybe, the order will have changed. Maybe we'll be the ones who are the norm. That's just an idea, but I just wanted to write positively, because I may have a few screws loose, but I spend time screwing them back in, and I will probably have to my whole life. A good description is as follows: "People with BPD are often exceptionally idealistic, joyful and loving. However they may feel overwhelmed by negative emotions, experiencing intense grief instead of sadness, shame and humiliation instead of mild embarrassment, rage instead of annoyance and panic instead of nervousness. People with BPD are especially sensitive to feelings of rejection, isolation and perceived failure. Before learning other coping mechanisms, their efforts to manage or escape from their intense negative emotions may lead to self-injury or suicidal behavior. They are often aware of the intensity of their negative emotional reactions and, since they cannot regulate them, they shut them down entirely This can be harmful to people with BPD, since negative emotions alert people to the presence of a problematic situation and move them to address it."

Now I am not saying I wanted to be treated differently. Ever. It is my personality. It is not an aspect of it or a problem I can solve. It's not all I am but it's mixed up in the sum of my parts. I just thought I'd write a little about it since I haven't done so before. If you'd like to read a good scholarly article, click below my hysterical laughter

Borderline Personality Disorder

Christmas en route

Yuletide banter is sluggish, half-hearts wreathed around

the doors knocking closed.

Today, a small breathing of pine perfume,

my face reflected in a red bauble and I blushed,

in a gold bauble and I am sickening for something.

In my head, the guests sip their drinks and zip sequin dresses,

and a man goes mad on the piano.

observations of a fictional mind

The warm white noise of endless highways, riding into infinity on the back of a Harley, tasting pieces of heaven between my newly sharpened teeth, fanged fresh from the orphanage. Whispers cut from baby-breath in the dark follow me at night.I imagine raindrops of sound, falling and forming pits that fossilize into a documentation of this temporary transient brilliance. Who birthed me with this head full of holes? Empty of holes, should I say? Should I say anything at all? No, stay silent and fall into the shallow ears of shells that line sleep's shore. Marching in my bedclothes. Caped crusader, watching everything going about loud, loud, loud, in expectation; everything sighs, missing and waiting, impatience for the beckoning. Pigeons swoop from the underpass. A million stars make up the city's glow in the dark violet-blue jewel swell of the night. Yawning on furniture, humming as fog rolls over to bury our vibrations beneath its haze of captured metropolitan light. The whole earth has tilted and I have lost my reason to look now. I am weak, napping, crying softly, yelling loudly. Head aching and I can't listen to Unchained Melody and keep my face dry at the same time.

Clocks only tick 

Things only get older

People only grow

He only loves me

I only hope.

This poem

So, this is the poem that I will end up writing
when no other poem is willing to do the work.

This is the poem I write when I'm past not
able to sleep and well into not
even trying. This is born of body burnout.

This unfolds as I unpack myself from
bags beneath by eyes.This is an ugly poem
unfolding from ugliness.

In this poem, I'll make an ambiguous allusion
to someone who is missing.

This may be one of a few kinds of resentful:. parental
psychosocial, rebel-without-a-cause sentimental.

This poem is to say I am not a talented poet.
I'm a poet with a stammer,speech impaired,
a poet with neither the rage

So this poem may plagiarise, quoting,
not even poets have measured how much
the heart can hold. -Zelda Fitzgerald.
This poem throws itself down the stairs.

How do I urge this poem to do better?
I can't, I can only keep writing it.
Writing out my resentment, my restlessness.
Wretchedness, Wanting.

In this poem I CAN RAISE MY VOICE
for my wanting, and then in the same poem
shut my voice into a music box
to leave on your nightstand.

This poem has managed a neat trick. Illusion?
Some rhetoric magic. Some see a rabbit appear from
nowhere. Ohers see a girl being sawed in half.
.
The best (- though, at what?) could see both
but know it's not really about that.
They know it's about appearing as something
that are you not and that's a craft in itself.

As I or this poem already told you,
I am  not a talented poet. I am just a girl
masquerading as someone she's not,
because she doesn't know what she is yet
or wants to be or could be, yet.

She and this poem may seem to have more
to them, to be even interesting,
but both are waiting for you to grow bored.
"

Haikus

Lonely, long-winded
as the Vatican hallways-
words not always true.



The sunshine was stolen,
petrified in the shadows
of midday stillness

Losses

Losses are not felt incidentally for my body being 
in constant withdrawals. 
I still stretch on tiptoe to reach things 
I grew into years ago.

As I accumulate memories,
it seems there is more missing
The stairs are missing.
A watch I wore once, now unlearned,
but I can still hear ancient voices in the attic.

I am meeting people who have sold their bodies
act like guilty children
and deny deny deny.

I am meeting the guilty children who were
unearthed from orphanages
into cruelties and then armies and then jails
and they still blush
when you tell them they've done good.

They still check the rooms for recording devices 
upon entering, entertaining old echoes. 
I check my quiet corners for signs of you.
I check my poems for signs of wounds. 

Things in pairs

We grew

We grew the earth, grew it around us and grew into it. We grew into pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes and we grew into our names. We learnt to tie the laces of our shoes and to tie our tongues around our names, and the names of other things, other people, and around other people's tongues. We planted our cultures, cultivated them, and they blossomed into traditions and stereotypes and generalisations and rituals. We broke in our shoes, broke the ice, broke our voices, broke promises. We broke glasses, hearts and bones. We built hierarchies, looked up, looked down, bowed down. We broke down into dictatorships and demonstration. We found solutions like democracy and diplomas and delegated. We fixed fountains and freight trains and falling trees in the forest and faucets that leaked. We formed partnerships, made promises, pledged to parties for both politics and both parents. We made marriage and then we annulled, we divorced. We fabricated the faiths that we fed on. We invented stopwatches, reality television, pedicures, lampshades, philosophy, greenhouses, dictionaries, exclusivity, feng shui, hand-holding, opiate medication, street art, martial arts, lawsuits, lingerie, car boot sales, snow days, psychics, boarding schools, toast, baseball, psychiatry, bird-watching, plaid, research, stag nights, salads, and interventions. We wanted and we wished and we waited and we wanted for more. We were growing faster than we invented. We were outgrowing ourselves and our earth and our shoes and our names. We forgot what we had found and fixed and formed. We broke down eventually and went broke. We are waiting to invent a new way we can fix ourselves.

Thoughts

You pray to the void, A said, which made me angry, not because I am faithful to any higher power that warrants prayer but because he assumed to know that which I do pray to, and I pray for him to leave me alone and I pray everytime I hear a siren on the offchance that I am omnipotent and I pray sometimes that these times will never end, somehow, and so I suppose I am praying to avoid.
Ill-lit discontinuities, resentments in rusty places harboured, until mouths become barnacled shut and eroded away by bits of green glass bottles, broken and glinting in words that shine like you've never heard them shine before. Walking and talking on no sleep no wake and by noon I'm already tattered a hundred times over, unaware and apathetic about stars beyond the galaxies bordering my mind, hemming it in. Dicing together my fragmentary thoughts on the fridge door. When I play guitar, it creaks like it's dying and I start crying. Friends I've made like J are one man miracles, one man crime waves turned to new leaves of sweet potato plants crawling around the corners of the ceiling. Flash in the pan people, and I wonder if I'm one of them. We wonder about one another how long we'll be there for. We re not meant to be here anyway, and we are both capable of being so happy and so sad all at once, that there is no space for emptiness, and that's a lovely consolation when you feel like a ghost. Only J is being reborn, blushing and comparing himself to a fourteen year old and aching face from smiling, and I am ageing, trying to pull off the grown-up shoes and walking with a limp, as I invariably will, no matter how far I walk in them, for I'm out of step all the time.

In other news,
multiple regression analysis
repeated measures analyses of variance
polythogonal and orthogonal variables- contrast codes, the Helmert coding, the Tukey HSD
sphericity

Not always on the bright side

Turning over old leaves, finding a stray piece of cirrus cloud with a tarnished lining

and wearing it around a finger like it's platinum enough to sink a ship,

and turning away from the glare of foreign fields where there is no cloud at all

to even let some go stray, and where he sun is boastful and bloated in he sky and beaming

about it all day, because on the bright side, sometimes,

things are only looking better for being bronzed,

especially when on your side it's looking a little grey and there's

nothing wrong with grey, anyway, and the grass is probably astroturf,

and the skies all blue ceilings and the smiles are cut out of catalogues that

are cried over by teenage girls. So spending time letting eyes grow into he dark

because it's not really dark, just darker, and shadows only mean there's light,

and in the dark you might catch the sight of star, freckled on your windowpane

at night, or if not, it will certainly be there, winking at you:

I'm not thinking positive, but why would I only think one way? 

(Anti-Platitudes Campaign). 

Question marks are dropping and pooling around my ankles
and I can't feel my feet. Bloodless, but full of blood that belongs
to everyone but me, it seems,
and when dare to confront the mirror I am not sure who I see
because I have been crystallised and fictionalised
and handwritten in laughably horrible lies.
I can't say I don't know who or what I am anymore
because that would suggest there was a time
I was sure, but that's not right. Still, I barely know my face.
I don't know, I don't know
but it could be
my doppelgänger I see. I hope she's got my place
because she'll do it a lot better than me. I'll let her be.


   

Bukowski: misanthrope or heart of gold?

"People are not good to each other. Perhaps if we were, our deaths wouldn't be so sad." 



 I made this mostly in honour of my neighbour and new friend John whose hero is Charles Bukowski and who, before meeting me, had never spoken to any other person for whom the name Bukowski means anything. I happen to have two of his poetry books in my poetry section and found so many fascinating interview tapes of his spoken opinions I couldn't resist doing one of my video vignettes of this complex man. Despite all his misanthropic attitudes and his self-proclaimed detest for the human race, he can't conceal a deeper seated compassion for others and concerns about how people within society treat one another, as well as revealing some hope of a 'new beginning' that you wouldn't imagine he holds, considering his poetry is so dark and raggedly furious.

Joy

Underground

A ridiculous joke of a poem

Poets are meant to watch nature work, and weather.
Now, I've never claimed to be a poet
but have written my fair share of poetry
so if I ever were to decide a that's what I was to be
would I qualify? With poems that distinctly lack
in allusions to grass, insects, trees, water, sky?
I watch the window to see the light shift
through from blue to purple to black to grey
and then all the way back to blue, for another day.
Time to start, even though I didn't try
to sleep at all, just sat up scribbling poetry.
Grass grows, yes, and the process is quite swift
but not noticeable, like birds, that sing, and squawk
and rivers rush by, but there's only one murky one here
from which dead bodies are pulled out each year.
And trees have leaves that sound like they whisper
if you want to be poetic about it, but they don't talk.
Insects have more eyes and legs, and the invertebrate
doesn't talk or sing, so overall, the watching
of weather and nature must be tiring, to just wait
for it to repeat itself, for something worth writing
in a poem- the sun sets (yet again), rain falls (wet again)
grass growing (still) and leaves falling (chill)
and birdsong isn't the best, and not exciting
and insects won't inspire you unless it's in biting.
So I guess I'll never be a real poet, because I never
really pay attention to nature, or watch the weather.
I'd rather write about people. I think, for obvious reasons:
they don't repeat themselves constantly, forever and ever
the same sun, the same rain, the cycles and seasons.
I'd rather write about people, all changing together.

A case of Basket Case, music video

Lost words

These are words that were once part of our vernacular but due to the infrequency of usage were phased out of the language. However, so many of them are perfect for expressing things that we currently don't have the means to put into words, so I want to bring some of them back, because there must have been a time that people who had access to such a broad vocabulary could communicate better than we can, and also produce vastly superior rhetoric.

abluvion (n).- substances or things that are washed away

admurmuration (n.)- the act of murmuring

advesperate (v.)- to approach evening

aerumnous (adj.)- full of trouble

agathokakological (adj.)- made up of both good and evil

all-overish (adj.)- feeling an undefined sense of unwell that extends to the whole body

arrision (n.)- the act of smiling at

balter (v.)- to dance clumsily

bedinner (v.)- to treat to dinner

chrestomathic (adj.)- devoted to the learning of useful matters

consensescence (n,)- growing old together

constult (v.)- to act stupidly together

desiderium (n.)- a yearning for something that one once had but no more

elozable (adj.)- readily influenced by flattery

engouement (n.)- an irrational fondness 

facidendum (n.)- something that should be done

fleshment (n.)- the sense of excitement that comes from initial success

foiblesse (n.)- a distinctive weakness, or a weakness for something

foreplead (v.)- to ask too much in pleading

forplaint (adj.)- tired from complaining

gobemouche (n.)- one who believes anything, no matter how absurd

griseous (adj.)- rather grey 

happify (v.)- to make happy

idiorepulsive (adj.)- self-repelling

ignotism (n.)- a mistake made from ignorance

inadvertist (n.)- a person who persistently fails to take notice of things

indesinence (n.)- want of proper ending

indread (v.)- to feel a secret dread

induratize (v.)- to harden the heart

introuvable (adj,)- not capable of being found, specifically of books

jentacular (adj.)- of or pertaining to breakfast

jettatore (n.)- a person who is bad luck

kankedort (n.)- an awkward situation

latibulate (v.)- to hide oneself in a corner

letabund (adj.)- filled with joy

malesuete (adj,)- accustomed to poor habits

matutinal (adj.)- active or awake in the morning hours

microphily (n.)- the friendship of people who are not of equal intellect or status

minionette (adj.)- small and attractive

misclad (adj.)- inappropriately dressed

misdelight (n.)- pleasure in something wrong

naturesse (n.)- a generous act

need-sweat (n.)- sweat from nervousness or anxiety

nefandous (adj.)- too odious to be spoken of

nemesism (n.)- frustration directed inward

noceur (n.)- a dissolute or licentious person, one who stays up late at night

obdormition (n.)- the falling asleep of a limb

obganiate (v.)- to annoy by repeating over and over

occasionet (n.)- a minor occasoin

pertolerate (v.)- to endure steadfastly until the end

petrichor (n.)- the pleasant smell of rain on the ground

philodox (n.)- a person in love with his own opinions

propassion (n.)- the initial stirrings of a passion

psithurism (n,)- the whispering of leaves moved by the wind

quaesitum (n.)- the answer to a problem, the thing that is looked for

redamancy (n.)- the act of loving in return

remord (v.)- to remember with regret 

repertitious (adj.)- found by chance or accident

resentient (n.)- a thing that causes a change of feeling

rue-bargain (n.)- a  bargain that one regrets or breaks

safety-firster (n.)- a person who is unwilling to take risks

sesquihoral (adj.)- lasting an hour and a half

subtrist (adj.)- slightly sad 

tacenda (n.)- things not to be mentioned, matters passed over in silence

twi-thought (n.)- a vague or indistinct thought

umbriphilous (adj.)- fond of the shade

unconversable (adj,)- not suitable for social converse

undisonant (adj.)- making the sound of waves

unlove (v.)- to cease loving a person

velleity (n.)- a mere wish or desire for something without accompanying effort 

videnda (n.)- things worth seeing

vocabularian (n.)- one who pays too much attention to words

well-aired (adj.)- having sweet-smelling breath

wondercloud (n.)- a thing that is showy but worthless

xenium (n.)- a gift given to a guest

yesterneve (n.)- yesterday evening 

zoilus (n.)- an envious critic

zyxt (v.)- to see

the most frightening thing

statistically unlike me

It applies

Io

He is a friend of a friend and the gesture closest to friendship that I gained with him releasing my grasp on the opportunity to get to know him, so his real name won't settle in my fiction of him. I will call him Io, the name of one of Jupiter's moons, so that when he is read he will be cloaked with the Galilean mystery of uncharted extra-terrestrial territories and known only as an enigmatic celestial body, or else as a myth.

Io had seen some rough seasons by the time I met him. By that time, his skin was like a lunar surface. At a distance, he glowed pale and luminescent, but up close he was ragged craters, all gritty and scars and teeth. The rougher he looked, the rougher time had been, and the softer his edges became. Any distinctive outlines gradually eroded away and an abrasive asymmetry remained, leaving him looking like just another one but also just another weird one, spilling over into himself, lighting his own eyes from the reflection of others'.

Some thought he was dense, some called him ill. Doped up, autistic, some spectrum of something that could explain his strange sameness, his darkly-lit atmosphere, the way he loomed at parties, an awkward eclipse. After some talks through computers into the long nights I had come to feel as threats, I saw his fearlessness, as infinite space. I had known boys like him before but they had gone to great beyond only to come back with wan faces, indifferent. They were finite because they did not have the fog that formed across Io's eyes, forcing him to be be always squinting through it, always searching, comparing, measuring space between stars. He did not react to the earthly gases that choke the rest of us with truths we come to swallow and stomach.

Pupils expanding like the universe, by the time I met him, he was already playing with the alignment of the cosmos. Soon he was obsessive and so distant his obsessions became orbits of themselves. Astral, unstoppable, inexplicable just as long as the sky is immeasurable. He meticulously experimented with levels of conciousness, crossing his hemispheres, climbing between the different cortices from lower to higher, observing his body as it detached from his mind. He unhinged himself an inch more with each chemical reaction he burnt with flames pale blue, black, grey, brown.

Then he began to collect crystal quartz and carrying them around with him. He claimed that, without them, we would not have our radios, our televisions, our radars. We would not have those powers of detection he felt he was mastering. He was communicating with light refracted from prisms, with lenses, with electric charges. I swear he must have been somewhat starved of oxygen from his imagined cosmogyral conquests because by the time I had stopped getting to know him, by the time he was unhinged too far from my reality, he had become shrunken and discoloured. I heard that he created a shrine in his bedroom and stopped seeing the people who once called him a friend. Only the neighbours had the chance to notice him now he stopped attending parties, to instead stay at home speaking to crystals, tipping the scale of star maps, or standing on his lawn every night in Fulham, with quartz clutched in his fists. The friend through which I had become acquainted with Io told me that he'd said the crystals were parts of his rocket ship, fragments of the vessel that had once brought him home, but he doesn't have a home anymore, no home for me, says Io, for he is just a foreign moon, once explored, now only meant to circle a lonely planet that we can't seem to find.

Johnny Cash in retrospect

I made another documentary style film about another of my once drug-addled heroes, Johnny Cash. Like Edie, he reflects on the past and contemplates a brief future.

William

I was overcome with a sudden and urgent need to write this, and to tell him, as I see him, for him and whomever else to see.

When I am left to talk to myself, I often find my thoughts wandering to wherever William is. Often, I call on him and most of those times, he comes. He comes to smile, he comes to prove, he comes to give in fewer than a handful of guitar chords whatever it is that my mind often wanderlusts after: how can I write this in some way that will make sense to anyone but me? Sylvia Plath wrote two on two occasions I can remember distinctly about her own heartbeat, once in The Bell Jar and another time in Elm. In the semi-autobiographical novel, herself in fiction, Esther, contemplates her own heartbeat when she tries unsuccessfully to commit suicide and again when she attends the funeral of a friend. Now, I'm not going anywhere morbid with this. I'm just trying to point out how being reminded of 'the old bray' of her heart demonstrated how determined her body was to survive, and how precious her life actually was. William is my braying heart. I don't need to feel for my pulse to be reassured of that which I'm sure many people don't need to be even assured of once but I very much do, and all the time. 'I am. I am. I am,' the heart would beat out, telling her, you lived, you live, you'll live. William's body language translates to my vital signs and I am no good at reading people but there's nothing obscured about the clear message he sends with a smile, with a word, with his self. There's no unsettling ambiguity, no hidden meanings, nothing but what I need to know all the time: you lived, you live, you'll live. I don't even need to ask for what he continually gives. I don't know if I've described it well enough. Have you ever met someone so giving that you wonder what is leftover for them when the day is done? Have you ever known someone to know you so well that they know how badly you rely on others, and how ashamed you are of it because it's so desperate a need, but instead of pointing it out to you or shying from it, they give themselves to be relied on. And they let you try to prove yourself right- they let you take advantage and take for granted and forget what they do for you, because you almost want them to leave you with only the evidence that you're meant to be lonely and deserved it all anyway and shouldn't live, and shouldn't have lived, and all that- they let you crush them under the weight of your need but stubbornly refuse to give that hateful part of your self any satisfaction. They stay, until you realise that they aren't going, that you live, that they will live with it, and you have to live with it too. And that isn't a bad thing at all.  Have you ever had someone who is just so wonderful that they will do anything for you but let you hate yourself? Let me introduce you to William. You don't deserve him, and neither do I. Nobody does. Perhaps I'll meet him in another life, when I can be the one who feels the impact when he takes a fall, instead of the other way around. In another life, I'll beat alongside his heart like a second heart. 

Terminology used in the study and practice of statistics that could be interpreted as meaning something else, and not numerical:

confidence intervals, critical value, proportional reduction in error, residual plots, sum of absolute error, standard deviation, adjusted means, power function, repeated measures, violations of assumptions, conditional predictions, degrees of freedom, dummy codes, outliers, planned comparisons, power transformations, random transformations, unbiasedness, rank perturbation,

new ways of creating poetry in the new generation

You love me, you love me not.
Last petal drops. The daisies rot.

Acrostic: favourite poet

I decided to search the index of the first sentences of new thorough anthology of Frank O'Hara's poems, and make an acrostic for his name using the lines beginning with corresponding letters, should it work. Luckily, it did


Five sobs lined up on the doorstep
Rooftops blocks away from me
Awakening, now the war has broken out.
Now it seems Far Away and Gentle
Kra Kra

On the vast highway
'
Here we are again together
Apricots! parishes!
Red ringles in the sunset!
And I do nothing new.

When I thought of the past, I had
to stop because it made me sad
thinking that I did not fulfil any
of the dreams I'd thought I had.

New days come like the past seems to fade away
with no beginnings, all dissociative
morning songs, and I am rapt
in fugue cloud and sun dapple, reflected
onto torn screens. I only just feel it
hit my just woke skin.
The stain from underneath a warm cup
embeds itself in rings like a signet's seal
on all the cluttering, all my belongings.
Gold-amber turned to seafoam green.
The moment of that colour conception
is loved and jilted by lacklustre artist's
half heart oblivion, trying to catch
the detail in all and anything
but only/in order to overlook
everything else.
Anything else? A plate of buttered toast
and a chilled glass of-
and in the absence of one thing,
find another, find another, feel for another.
Another is felt for,, slummed for,
mourned for, maddening-gone for,
hurry-upped for, make-believed for.
Rhapsodies in blues,
elbows on the tables,
clear-eyed sight, clear-cut smile
Find the ones you do not confuse.

The beliefs of R.D. Laing- a video I made

One of my fantasy dinner party guests, heroes, and top choices if I were ranking historical figures based on how much they fascinate me in the present, R.D. Laing was the pioneer of the 60's anti-psychiatry movement. His belief that insanity as observed from the outside as what one would call insanity is only a sane reaction to an insane environment as it is experienced by the one who is supposedly insane was one that stood in direct opposition to attitudes of contemporary Western medicine, which advocated medication and electroshock convulsion treatment and lobotomies and other such extreme physiologically-damaging procedures. Most importantly, he taught that we can never truly experience the world as anyone but we ourselves are experiencing it. We can only observe, and experience the observing of those who are observing our experience of observing them etc. etc. So we can never wholly understand what is mad and what is not because we are all experiencing it all so differently, and putting us into diagnostic categories can be dangerous when it starts to cut divides between peoples and marginalise some and put people into boxes where they will not be treated as human, for labels of 'madness' remove all credibility, a basic human right.

I made a little film about him. Mostly it's about the audio and what he says but the clips are there to aid the listening.

Mourning suits (a poem revised)

How did you wear it so easily, make
your head hang so naturally?
Perhaps it's one of those things for only some people.
For some, mourning suits.
I'm not one of them.

Tell me, how did you cut your grief
so clean in half, just like
a smile I saw caught
in the gleam of sun on a swimming pool,
shimmering in a mirage
or a lifetime ago,
when the summer heat knew us
and was simmering
around us, lifetimes ago.
It cut the world in half,

divided then from now,
divided moonlight,
split open decay
to allow for more decay.
We've been doing that since May.

Now it's autumn, meaning
cold feet and a pile of laundry
losing heat, and inconsolable sky and
a train pulls into the platform, empties itself,
and on a sixth floor balcony,
evening dewdrops cling to the railing,
trembling, shy.
The thud of old telephone books,
thrashing in the wind.
Our bones shook, as we went on
running on,
ruining one
another for anybody else.
Everybody else.

Broken leaves, gold and russet.
Seasons leave us more than people do so
why is it we don't mourn the fallen from trees
as well as wars and cars and wars and wars and wars.
The 11th of the 11th month at 11 they called
for peace. Rest in peace.

At 11:11 I wish that
someone somewhere
will soon kiss away
my idiosyncrasies
and my memories
until they sigh,
bye, bye, and you're gone
as if never here.

They always say earth is a place you didn't belong.
Cold and birdsong, chuckling at the window.
You are always there- yes you,
at the edge of that photograph
in lecture halls. in guitar chords,
in nothing-at-alls, in hospital wards.

Your face, slow-burning,
an after-image, across fields of morning light,
under the lapels of mourning suits.

Retrospective perspective productivity activity

I found this while I was sorting through and throwing out (yes, actually throwing into the bin and therefore letting go of) box after box of papers.

Introduction = sowing the seeds = the moment of conception = an idea planted, grows = we go about planting kisses = flower beds = petal soft pillowcases = the feel of your cheek's touch = sleeve, where I am wearing my heart = worn out = feeling wrists to find a pulse = a search for vital signs = warning, danger ahead = the curse and blessing of the power of forethought = chess games and computational decision trees = detaching from all emotion to access pure reason = choking on Kant's passages (and there's nothing pure about that) = mouthful of musings = philosophy pieces = information that people can't or won't swallow = nobody wants neuroscience at the dinner table = meditations on a mealtime = hospital 2004-5, 2007, 2010  = food and feelings group = a whole new language and unnatural associations = learning to speak, or say it in other ways = a critical period to make them understand = growing up, growing into new habits, growing out of old ones = life is a line, not a circle = drawing lines = boundaries, beginnings and endings  = it begins to take shape = life is not a shape = the possibility of something else other than fulfilment, other than completion, in a life as happy as any other = setting apart now and then, us and them, happy or not, good or not, too much or not enough, all or none = ways to categorise everything and everyone and ourselves = social cognition = part of human nature = unnaturally human = war, schadenfreude, Josef Fritzel = I do not understand = what is the point? = small purposes and pleasures, and the process of seeking them out = ketchup and small pots of jam and teaspoons =everything shrinking away = figurative and literal = most things = food and feelings = such is life, such it has been = you don't notice strangeness until it is all you have seen until the moment you noticed everything, strangely - new eyes, fresh sight = laser surgery = sight for sore eyes = another one I don't understand = meeting new people = Introduction.

During the process of looking through years' of writing, I can only in retrospect appreciate the beauty of misunderstanding and teaching yourself to understand, making mistakes and cleaning them up to only make them again in different forms, to changing all of the time and yet feeling fossilized, or paralysed, or petrified, and then seeing all that written down in certainty, unwitting of how the certainty itself is uncertainty and overall, the only consistency throughout all I've found so far in my Aladdin's nostalgic cave of pictures and words and ticket stubs and scribbles and receipts and notes left by friends and phone numbers written by strangers and love letters written from lovers and not lovers and poems and pages torn out and blacked out and everything else, like the equation of relations between the subjective and introspective, nonsensical and identical.. the only thing that never seems to change is that it's all so stubbornly inconsistent. I used to think that looking back at writing and collections of keepsakes and mementos from the past would help piece together a picture of a life like compiling a jigsaw puzzle until it all looks clear, but now I realise how making a narrative of our own lives, making our selves consistent and into a story told as time elapses, is something that our mind forces us to do without us knowing we are doing it, and that keeping a paper trail as you go along, like I have, is something that fights against that. I've only just seen this. This mess doesn't make sense of me, it just makes sense that it is a mess because the years that passed up until now were awfully messy while I was writing them down, my writing becoming messier. It is the writing things down in the moment, or trying to typewrite feelings in the moments we feel them, or keeping souvenirs from the moments, trying to make matter of them, that retrospectively pulls apart the stories we have stitched together to form a comprehensive narrative for the life lived so far. We weave the threads of these stories to make sense of random senselessness and chaos and endless mess, so that it all means something. Seen together, the story doesn't make sense as it didn't then and why should it? It all matters as much anyway. 

The world is your oyster, 
Just follow your heart,
Please drop each platitudinous phrase,
The oyster was swallowed,
and every path that I've followed
I only took in search of your praise.

him

It frightens me-
the eyes that now stare,
maddened by some desire
(there must be some mistake)
but what scares me more
is what he is able to make
of that which he cares for
(a liar, heartbreak)

Praying that thoughts of ends would never
have to come, putting a sign on the door,
do not disturb for knocking 
because we were out watching our city
glowing from Primrose Hill.
The sun was tossed up, round and bright gold,
and I was off my head with how beautiful
one morning, one moment, could be.
I remembered someone telling me once
that good literature comforts the disturbed
and disturbs the comfortable.
Some things so faraway, all is kept neat,
but up close it's just crawling and dirty
and how can you be sure that you are not blind?
Nobody looks you in the eye
and letters never come on time
and I was trying to read your mind
even though we are both scarecrows
with no birds to scare.
Questions but no answers, or rather
no purpose for the questions we might have
for what can a mind made only of straw
really mind about another
mind made up
until the very last straw?
We stood there, watching the city watch us
with its big spinning eye, and you said
something about justice.
I disagreed, said something back about mercy
and turning away from what you've seen
like you went blind
long enough to be kind.
The clouds were hanging in black cloaks
and none of them lonely, and nor are we,
for what these words are worth:
One for sorrow, two for delights
Tomorrow, you'll be catching all the lights.
We took the underground train home
because we thought to stop at the museum of natural history
would turn habits and thoughts that are old
into to fossils, turn fools into gold,
and turn questions into mystery.

A patchwork person

I think if I were a fictional character, or if there was one character I most resemble in my disposition, there wouldn't be a specific individual but a specific combination of three or four.  None of whom I am considering in terms of their best features, but it is more their flaws that make them sort of fictional representations of parts of myself, that I can relate to. 

Firstly, there's Neely O'Hara, a precocious 17 year old with talent who recklessly throws herself into an addiction to all kinds of pills in order achieve the greatness she feels she wants and her promising career is destroyed by her drive which is both self-destructive and stubborn. Then there is Lux Lisbon who is kept largely a mystery to the reader/film-watcher of the Virgin Suicides, but it seems that she feels trapped and rebels against the structure imposed upon her. She has sexual encounters that feel empty to her and seems to neglect herself, and in the film she loses her virginity to someone who she knows finds her attractive, who then leaves her immediately afterwards, which is probably something that contributes to her participation in the mass suicide commited by her and her sisters. Then there is Astrid from White Oleander, whose personality is so pliable she becomes a mirror of whoever is around her, or else she protects herself by adapting her appearance to get the reaction she wants, but before she knows what she wants, she asks other people what she is like so she can have an identity for herself. She copies how others behave and talk and in the book she describes herself as having a face that says, 'I'll do anything, just please love me.' Finally, there is Blanche Dubois. I think I was a lot more like her before the bubble burst and the delusions became clear as delusions. She is quite stuck in her bubble, but I think the way Tennessee Williams describes her as being 'uncertain' in her manner, having movement that 'suggests a moth', and the ways in which she is incredibly needy of attention but only the kind of attention that she wants and is in control of, is something I feel is echoed in me, and again, this is another not-so-positive attribute. Then again if asked what my good qualities are I would find it hard to come by them. My mother was always afraid of me embarrassing myself (or being embarrassed by me) as I was growing up so I was never told I was especially good at anything until I'd really proved it. I suppose that way I'd never turn out to be one of those people who humiliates themselves on X factor thinking they can sing but they can't. And it stopped me from becoming complacent or deluded about possessing talents or positive qualities that weren't actual or obvious to anyone else. But it also prevented me from being able to make claims that I have any to this day. Not that it's my mother's fault. They do fuck you up, but you fuck them up too, and you'll fuck it all up completely if you go about being bitter and blaming parents, the world, extraneous influences etc. for fucking with you because you'll end up cynical and bitter and one of those people others feel sorry for. So I'm glad my mother never gave me false hopes, because I know now any hopes I do have are ones I've earned my own right to possess. I won't ever think I'm great at anything because I'm not, and I won't ever be able to write a good cover letter or big myself up, but I'll be able to get the certificate to prove I'm as good as I need to be, and I won't go around pointing fingers at whomever for making me whatever it is I turn out to be. So maybe that's how I'm different than all these characters. And the way in which I'm better: I'm real, obviously. 

If there was a dictionary
containing an entry for Daisy
like any other word
beyond synonyms for this disposition
such as crazy, on adverb
i.e. nervously, clumsily
I don't think there would be a a way to define
me, or Daisy, ever clumsy,
but what is written in each line
of the grandiloquent poetry that isn't mine
and is not for me but about me
now penned by those who look but don't see

because if they did see they'd realise
I am no material with which o rhapodise
and there is nothing poetic
about something this pathetic,
only
pathetically,
such ugly
honesty

I make babbling possible in sign language. 

(inaniloquent) 

There is a time I like to be awake for,

when night has pulled up every drawbridge to daylight

and the mind is a single mind

on the cusp of everything

and not a satellite like everything else,

all the feral atoms spinning in orbit 

and the surrounding corners of the world 

that give the illusion of containment, 

but at the very eye of all stormy experience.

Yet on bad nights, feeling this solipsistic 

only feels lonely, and suddenly

the mind being so full makes that everything else

empty. The mind seems then to exist

for the sole purpose of knowing 

that there is a hollowness

in the guts of the city

and that everyone is asleep. No one is there,

except for you. 

Oh, life.

Some very simple things to remember

- People are not looking and laughing at you. 

- The sins you committed against yourself are forgivable; you can practice forgiveness all you want but nothing will get better if you don't forgive yourself 

- Some of the greatest things you do will be things that no one else will see. 

- Your cousin would be proud of you and that's all that matters

- We never really grow up

- Not everyone will like you

- They are not right and neither are you

- They are not wrong and neither are you

- Your life is a miracle

- Even at it's darkest, the sky is never totally black

- Migratory birds always find their way back home

- Collecting things might make them more beautiful (notes scrawled on scraps of paper, books) 

- Collecting things might take away their light (fireflies, flowers)

James' Song 

This is a song about my friend James
He lives in Union Wharf
He's quite tall and pretty funny
and definitely not a dwarf.
He takes pictures of hills and ditches
and of Burmese folk.
He's pretty funny but I've said that already
He's clever and I laugh at every joke.
Well, not every joke.
Oh well.
One of my favourite times with James
was when he got me to ride a Boris bike
something I thought I would never do.
He's got another friend whose name is Mike
and he's pretty cool too.
Oh Silvina, have you seen her?
She's a portugeuse beauty. Absolutely, oh,
absolutely.
Oh Alice, oh Alice, oh Alice
why the malice?
Bring the love to Union Wharf
and there will be enough love in there
to fill every coffee cup from here
to Dusseldorf.

Collaboration with the greats- Van Gogh and Turner, once