jennie's red book

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Lord Byron

There was something about Elle, and I don’t think just for me, that was puzzling and enigmatic.  I have lingered long, through darker and lighter times, recalling the following memory of special moments spent with her.  It also serves as further proof of the benefits of giving deeper consideration to the relevance of synchronicity, and what revelations it may be highlighting that assist us to keep moving forward on our individual journeys through the school of life.

This is what Carl Jung meant by synchronicity:  it occurs when events that have no causal relationship come together, and in the process they reveal a deeper meaning.  In the majority of cases this clashing of two events will more often be put down to mere co-incidence.  While I have been sensitive to synchronicity all my adult life I am sure I have missed much, and certainly not always understood all the meaning that was intended.

Peter’s mother, Tinker, was a part of our girls’ lives for many more years than my mother.  She was one of the most stoical women I have ever known, and a force to be reckoned with.  And she also beat me hands down on stubbornness!  Her love of her family, her mischievous and playful ways, and her desire to get as much out of life as she could, was a great inspiration to us all, and particularly noted by her grandchildren.  She died on 7 March 2016.  Her life had become physically hard, and included a substantial amount of pain during her last years, but she continued to want to live, and was game for anything and everything.  Elle, unbeknown to us, had been regularly calling Tinker from her ‘casita’ in the last couple of months of Tinker’s life.  It was only when I told her that her gran was unwell, and suggested that she call her, that we learnt of this.

After Tinker died, and in early May, the family had organised a memorial for her in the church next door to her much loved home in Chesterton. After the service we returned to Peter’s sister’s home, and were all given the opportunity of choosing various items that would mean something to us from amongst Tinker’s everyday possessions.  Elle, in her characteristically simple manner, wanted only a couple of small things.  One item was a little box.  The other piece she brought into our kitchen once we were back home.  It was basically broken glass.  She asked me for something to put the tiny shards into.  She then explained to me that she had wrapped this six-inch fluted red glass vase, with an image of a spray of flowers on the side of it, in her shirt, and put it in her cabin luggage.  When she opened her bag it was shattered.  The glass was around one millimetre, maybe less, in thickness.  All that was left in tact was the base, and the rest of it was in pieces, and most of them frighteningly small.  She asked me to help her put the vase back together using Superglue!

I didn’t, for once in my life, voice my opinion that this was an impossible task.  It fills me with comforting joy that I held my tongue, and instead I said ‘of course’, and we began straight away on what felt, even at the time, like an intimate journey together. Elle had quite shaky hands so it was decided that she would apply the glue, and I would accurately place the shard in its position, hold it in place for a while, and then she would clear away the excess glue.  Only one piece could be glued at a time.  Day by day it slowly grew back together.  It was only when thinking back on this event, after Elle died, that I realised some of the most remarkable elements of the process.  I don’t have a memory of her searching for the exact piece that needed to be glued in next (there needed to be a sequence of placements), and neither do I remember us completing the job.  I think that she completed it by herself.  This only adds to the mystery and magic of the process.

It was either the first or second afternoon after arriving back on the island that we visited the three girls who had been her housemates from sometime in May until the end of August.  Claudia came with us, and it was something we needed to do, for them and for us, but it was all about sorrow and tears, and a deep longing to understand what had happened and why.  The girls were naturally in a deep state of shock.  Before we left they asked if there was anything we wanted to take away with us now from her room.  Her room was as if she had just left it for a moment – clothes strewn around, a mattress on the floor surrounded by books, notebooks and Spanish newspapers.  Peter noted later the relevance of all the Spanish newspapers.  Elle was determined to improve her Spanish.  We were all in a trance of shock!  I could hardly bear to look around the room, but my eyes were immediately drawn to something familiar on one of the shelves – the little red vase!  When I picked it up it looked like it had never been in pieces!  The fracture lines were barely visible.  There were also no little telling spaces anywhere, except for one triangular piece missing from the gilded and fluted top edge.  It was seamless except for that one gaping omission.

It took only a moment for a thought to spring to mind. Elle had ‘demonstrated’ how it was possible to put our family back together again, even though, yes, there would always be one vital and meaningful piece missing. We chose to put this valuable little vase into the coffin with her, a white dress, and a single white rose.  I do have a photo of these items, but a part of me wishes I still had that little vase, especially when courage drains from my hurting heart.  Of course the colour red never escaped me either – there was something distinctly heart-shaped about the memory.

I have certainly questioned what it is I think I am doing by blogging.  I know that I can never be sufficiently intellectually qualified to have the ability to know when a question is a very good question to raise, or what is the best answer to any given question.  And yet I do feel that I am beginning to find a way to cohere my own thoughts, or join up the dots of what were always more random and abstract ideas I had, some of which seemed as though they might be quite good, into a way of seeing that is beginning to make more sense of my world.  But am I side tracking from what would be a better way to spend what time I have left?  Am I lazy not to be out fundraising, or should I rather be helping people to make things better in their life by digging for water so that they don’t have to walk miles to find it?  Should I be giving up what I have accumulated in my life, and find out where I could serve humankind in more useful and practical ways?  All those may be true.  But they don’t feel like they fit onto me, or at least I don’t know where to get started even.  More importantly, I can’t imagine myself doing them.  That feels fundamentally true.  So then what?  I am enjoying applying myself to learning, to writing and reading.  It feels like a change is happening within me.  Can this be good enough?  So then what?  Well, if I am going to go this way what point could there be to it?  All I can think of is that at least I could serve as a witness to all the many experiences I have noted in the last couple of years. Perhaps this is a valid use of my time and of me.  I really hope so.  I shall endeavour to be honest and to question my motivations and my intent. And I shall carry on blogging, for now. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. I may be called elsewhere. Nothing stays the same, but equally you could also say nothing ever changes.  Which is true?  I like to think of that as typical of the many heads and tails that life provides us with.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Rather apt subject for my very own Red Book!  Have you ever felt that there appeared to be enough meaning to a surprising collision of two events that made you think:  there must be something more to this than mere coincidence?  If so, you may have experienced what Jung calls synchronicity.  And I don’t just mean when you have been thinking about someone you haven’t seen for a while, and within a short time they phone you.  That may be ESP, but doesn’t necessarily imply synchronicity.

I have been alert to synchronicity certainly since around the age of nineteen.  This is also the age I was when a growing disassociation from a church-based Christianity started to metamorphose into a more personal and heart-felt interest in the deep workings of my own spirituality.  At some point later in my life I gradually crossed over to the side of doubting that there was any possible framework on which a spiritual belief can be supported.  Science, and the likelihood of alien life forms, ensured that my faith would keep on eroding. About a year before Elle died, and having joined a meditation group next door with a very special lady called Val, I seemed to draw this period of my life to a close.  I told Elle that I had reached a faithful landing, and that I didn’t need to have all the answers; I was comfortable knowing that all my life’s experiences pointed more to the likelihood of truth lying in the spiritual realm than not.  Now I find that it is  scientists, psychologists and philosophers who are giving a foundation to a greater and deeper understanding of my world.

I have been listening to many lectures by different people on the most recurring figure in my life, Carl Jung, who I now understand better in my own left-handed right-brained abstract way.  I have been led to a book that has made Jung more accessible to me, and more particularly, his definition and understanding of synchronicity.  It has provided me with confirmation, including the ability to better interpret and gain a greater understanding of the meaning of those moments that I always knew were, at the very least, significant.  The name of the book is Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making, by Victor Mansfield.  It serves me well on the three subjects that I find are the greatest help in developing my faith:  science, psychology and philosophy.

I am going to use an example of an occurrence of synchronicity in my own life to illustrate why I have always held that these moments are of the utmost importance.  But first I need to give the outline of Jung’s definition, and a few other thoughts.

Jung first described his theory in the 1920’s but it wasn’t really taken seriously until a lecture he gave in Italy in 1951 to a number of intellectual thinkers of his time.

Simply put, his theory is this:

Synchronicity is the experience of meaningful coincidences if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

The following is an example as given by Jung in his book, Synchronicity, to explain what he means by the term:

“…My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the windowpane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results…”

Jung was well versed in mythologies and ancient cultures, and he knew what the symbolic meaning of the golden scarab was.  It was sacred to the Egyptian’s God of Creation, Resurrection and Immortality, or put another way, rebirth. It was even believed that the beetle carries messages that bring our attention to renewal, spiritual maturity, and the powerful influences of the invisible side of life.

With a bug in mind I can’t help remembering Elle’s haiku seven years before she died, and mine in response since her death:

Obscure miniscule creature

Little ugly bug

How often have you been seen?

Little bug I see you now

Oh the Bodhi tree

Fly away and on with me

Back to Jung, this confirmed that the meaning of the event ran even deeper than just the most incredible coincidence.  This example is the first of many he used to illustrate his theory.  He believed, as do many of his followers today, that almost all anxiety and depression, and its further deepening psychoses, was as a result of a dissatisfied subconscious; a subconscious looking for deeper answers to the meaning of life than just being told to make the most of a world that has no intrinsic meaning – that all that has happened since the beginning of time is purely coincidental.

The optimum idea though is that the coming together of two acausal events should bring with them a deep meaning that adds something to one’s inner movement towards one’s own higher intelligence, or, as it is most often called, to the individuation of the psyche or self.  In Jungian psychology this is described as a process of inner transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness and, over time, are to be assimilated into the whole personality.  If the process is more or less successful, the individual will become a well-functioning whole, rather than a fragmented, probably ineffective and therefore a non-directional personality.

Again perhaps this condition of non-direction has more to do with the plethora of ‘mental illnesses’ of today.  So few of us give attention to the state of our souls, because ‘soul’ has religious connotations, and not many people in the West have any form of contemplated and internalised faith.  I am always astounded, every time the subject of mental health comes up, that all the elected-to-speak experts talk about is how important it is to acknowledge their illness or disease, but no one seems to be interested in asking the question – why are so many people, particularly our young people, suffering varying forms of mental dis-ease.  I think the numbers are around one in four people who will suffer some form of mental illness in their lifetime.  Well, I think these numbers are unacceptable, and certainly indicate that something about modern life is going horribly wrong.  The advice being given seems to be saying that while yes, we should talk about it, we should not be baulking at the idea of giving out earlier, and without deeper investigation, more medication for depression and earlier.  Give out Ritalin to more ADD or ADHD children, despite the many destructive side effects.  (I am a bit cynical of who has been driving the direction of the latest studies!)  I believe the way Ritalin works on ‘overactive’ children is to suppress the part of the brain that supports play, which I understand to be a vital component of learning what it is to become an adult, and how we develop our socialising skills, which already children are not given enough time to do before being sent to school at the age of four and a half years old.

There is a lot more that can be said to substantiate Jung’s theory, and also to explain it more deeply.  I highly recommend the book if you are interested.  I found it to be both intellectual in its approach while equally being being accessible to anyone interested in learning more – I always think of this as a sign of someone who really has a good grip of his/her subject.  It is not necessary to make the written language bear proof to your intellect – I came across enough of that while studying art at university. It seemed to be the required credentials for most post-modernists!

There have been a number of occasions in my life when I have witnessed interesting coincidences, and while many of them carried some interesting meaning, I would not call them an example of Jungian synchronicity.  There have also been many moments when I would say I experienced ESP and other paranormal experiences.  Again, unless they led to a transformational experience, they too would not fall into the said category.  But I have experienced enough that do qualify.  It also makes perfect sense to me as to why there has been a greater cluster of synchronised events since Elle’s death, and equally that events of the past have revealed their meaning to me through the illustration of synchronicity.

First of all, the event:  about three weeks after Elle died, the family and our friend, Zoe, decided that it would be a good idea for Zoe to take on Elle’s car.  Another three weeks later, and with the car parked outside Greg’s home, the moment came for us to take it to our mechanic to give it the once over.  I would drive Elle’s blue Seat, and Peter would drive ahead of me.  We arrived at Greg’s, and before going in for a coffee, Peter and I decided to make sure it would start.  If we were not intending to go in for a coffee, Peter would have dropped me, stayed in his car and I would have followed him straight away in Elle’s.  It mattered from the point of view that we were together when we opened the boot of the car, and that we were not in a hurry at the busy mechanic’s shop to clear the car and hand it over.  It points to the emphasis placed on the meaning of the moment, and gave us time to respond to what lay in front of us, and to how it was presented, which also served to raise our awareness by piquing our curiosity at what we observed.

I was anxious about the whole procedure.  I turned the key and it started without any hesitation.  I gave it a good ‘rev up’ and switched off the engine.  As I walked around the car I suggested to Peter that we should make sure there was nothing left in the boot.  It was simultaneous with this point that I realised that internally the car was most unusually spotless, empty and dust-free.  When we opened the boot there was a single pile of three items. Curiously, at the bottom of the pile was a plastic bag containing twigs that Elle must have collected from somewhere, and for something.  On top of this was a rather dilapidated straw hat.  Finally on top, and facing correctly towards us, was a photo that Elle had printed onto glossy A4 paper.  Across the top of the horizontal photo, almost filling the whole page, were three sentences Elle had written.

Peter and I recognised the photo’s content straight away from a story that Elle had told us around the April or May in the year that she died, and our attention was secured.  Again there are many steps even as to how she came to tell us the story.  And without the earlier story there would have been no synchronous event.

The background to the meaning:  Elle entered our kitchen from her ‘casita’ shortly before leaving to go to work.  She had no shoes on her feet.  We often saw her this way at home, but I was curious if she intended going to work like that.  She told me that she had no shoes to wear, rather odd, so I said that as I was about to head off into Ibiza town, and would she like me to get her a pair of flip flops. She said yes, but make them as plain as possible.  I knew what she meant.  A couple of days later the exact same scenario happened, and this time I casually enquired as to what had happened to her Havaianas.  Peter walked into the kitchen at this moment.  She immediately started with, “Oh, Mom, Dad, I nearly died the other day.”  This was not an opening line we had ever heard before from either of our girls. She went on to tell us that she had been sitting on a beach, and there was a cliff behind her.  Her attention was drawn to a tree clinging to the cliff-side, close to the top.  (I don’t remember asking her which beach but somehow, perhaps ESP, I kind of knew the area where it was, and a friend was able to pinpoint the beach and tree for us later.)  She went on to say that she got an urge to climb to the tree.  It was mostly loose shale, and about half way up she felt that her flip-flops were making her ascent harder, so she decided to take them off and collect them on the way down.  It was only when she reached the tree that she looked down for the first time.  She said it made her scared, and she knew that the only way out of her situation was to keep climbing the cliff to a track above her.  So much meaning in that too! Once safe she had taken a photo from the track.  She had obviously thought a lot about the whole experience.  She then printed it, and had written three sentences across the top on the part that is the white border around it.  The sentences are:

Fear comes from looking back.  Error comes from doubt.  Keep moving forward.

Peter and I both knew that this was no ordinary moment. His initial response to the first sentence was that he always expected fear to arise from looking into what might happen next minute or further into the future.  And he wasn’t altogether wrong on this.  But both of us instantly saw how that could be the wrong direction to expect fear to come from. It is so clear that looking back into a time, when Elle still, lived pulls us deeper into sorrow and grief.  And most certainly error can come from doubt.  If one moves forward with full knowledge and understanding of what has gone on before, and commits to the movement, all should have a better chance of working out right.  Nothing makes more sense to us today than the advice ‘to keep moving forward’ into our futures.  I certainly recognise that the moments that slay me all happen as a consequence of looking or even glancing back.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t control the moments I spend with Elle, and these can equally be in her and our future.  Because I have this option I am not so deeply fearful when I choose to look back to a time when she was here with us, but generally I don’t allow myself to linger too long in that space.  While Peter and I think that Elle wrote those sentences for her own benefit and not ours, we remain within the requirement of acausality.  We both feel that something, perhaps her subconscious, motivated her to write them, and to create that incredible clear and totem pile, so that we wouldn’t and couldn’t miss the inherent meanings unless we were ‘blind and stupid’.

The synchronicity:  while quite obvious, I will just lay it out for the sake of tidiness. Elle had died.  We opened her car boot, and it and the interior of her car is incredibly clean.  (The day before she died she had shopped for art equipment to give an afternoon workshop to children at Pikes on the day following her death.  The fact that she had taken these couple of bags into Greg’s house from her car which, if left, would have made ‘the totem pile’ feel less personal to us, and equally, the fact of its cleanliness, made us all the more aware of what was left in the car.)  Those are the two events:  her death and the photograph.  Also, the two events had no causal links, that is, neither event caused the other to happen, but when juxtaposed they exhibited more meaning in the sum of their parts than each event taken as separate.

The deeper meaning:  I have already outlined much of the deeper meaning we took from this experience of synchronicity.  But more than this it served to give purpose to my step as I ventured deeper and deeper into my faith.  How can one give up on life and family, on beliefs, and a faith in the purpose of life, when you don’t feel completely abandoned in your grief?  I can see that something was at work in Elle too, perhaps a preparation for what was on her horizon.  There are many times I wish that if only things had worked out differently – all those ‘if only’s’ – but when I am at peace I know that something far bigger was at work in all our lives.

This is one of the stories of the incredible synchronicities that have occurred in our and my lifetime, both before and after Elle died, and not just for her immediate family.  Who amongst you feel sure and strong enough to call this out as pure coincidence?

Elle’s picture, and if we needed more meaning still, the boat in the bay belongs to the ex-husband of Elle’s mentor on the island, and he died in the same year as Elle.  This element translates as:  if you aren’t taking sufficient notice perhaps this will deepen your understanding of the importance of this photo.  It has its own inherent synchronicity.

August will always be a time of the year when I spend more than my usual amount of time with Elle.  I have got braver over the almost two years since she died.  This month doesn’t feel, at least so far, quite as deafening as the first August.

I have had a couple of ‘telephone boxes’ since Elle died, and it took me awhile to recognise that I have one here too in our latest lodgings.  They are always outside.  Makes sense.

August got under way with a number of Elle moments, and just this morning I had a flashback to a beautiful memory of Elle that visually will never dim.  It comforts us to know that Elle met both of our black guardians, Zac and Kito. Zac came first in September 2015 and Kito in the December.  We knew we wanted two dogs after Oscar died earlier in the same year.  They were to be of a similar age but not brothers.  I don’t know whether it is true or not, but we were advised against taking two dogs from the same litter.  There is often a hierarchy amongst a litter, and we might just end up with feuding siblings. Zac and Kito, although very different in their natures, are good friends.

This morning a hunter was out in the forest behind us.  Whenever there are loud bangs or lightening Zac becomes a quivering mess, his tail drops, all his usual bravado evaporates, and he starts to shiver uncontrollably.  We can’t think of any experience that he could be remembering.  Kito is not bothered at all.  It usually takes Zac a good hour of stillness before he trusts the world and emerges from his fear.  I was standing in the vicinity of my latest ‘telephone box’, giving him comfort, and into my mind popped the thought that perhaps it causes flashbacks to a terrible moment soon after he joined us.  The accident happened shortly before Kito’s arrival in our lives.  I have a white Toyota Hilux – not a small car, and I was returning from somewhere and carefully negotiating the swing into our carport.  I was moving very slowly because I knew that Zac was around, and having checked where he was, I thought he was safely out of the way.  But he had suddenly changed direction and decided to run around the front of the car.  This part is difficult for me to revisit – that instant when you know that something terrible has happened, and then you hear a stomach-wrenching cry of pain.  As soon as I saw him I knew that there was something very wrong with his hips.  Initially I lost it, and my wailing brought Elle running out of her casita.  She calmed me down instantly with a look, and carefully picked Zac up off the ground.  Even though he was in terrible pain he allowed her to carry him over to our bed of lavender bushes.  She carefully put him down between them, then sat down beside him.  He was instantly calmed albeit still in great pain.  I took myself in hand and managed to get hold of the emergency vet.  I will never forget the sight of Elle and Zac sitting and lying amongst the lavender.  It only struck me this morning that she probably knew exactly what she was doing when she placed him in amongst the lavender bushes – lavender is known to be soothing.  We took him together to the vet’s surgery, and while we waited to be seen, he lay calmly across her knees.  One hip was broken in a couple of places and the other was out of joint.

Zac and I were so lucky that the surgery was successful, although he now has some permanent metal in his one hip.  It was so hard, after the early convalescence, to make sure that he didn’t run.  He was meant to do no more than a trot but he loves to flatten out and run like the wind.  He is now back to being almost as good as new, but we do see the odd hop mid air, perhaps caused by a little ache in his hips now and again.  There are two reasons for our happiness.  We still have our loving, intelligent, mostly brave and cutely self-conscious little boy, and a ‘big brother’ to Kito.  But more importantly, we can return to the moment with no added sorrow, and allow our minds, both Peter and me, to linger over the vision of our beautiful gentle Elle sitting amongst the lavender bushes and under the olive trees, keeping puppy Zac calm and confident in that scary painful moment.  Elle also chose to come with me a week later to collect a much happier Zac.

Our boys, Kito who is never far from my side, and Zac who feels equally tied to both Peter and me, were called upon to give us love and support just under a year later.  And what’s more, we know they remember her too.

 

This morning, under the shower, I was particularly excited when this song popped up on my playlist.  Talk about music lifting the spirits.  To say it fitted my mood well would be an understatement!  It has been on my mind for a while to write about how I experience Killing Me Softly, and now seems as good a time as any.

On the basis that I have found music, lyrics more precisely, to be a moving source of inspiration and comfort, this is kind of how it goes.  It is as if the lyrics can bend to whatever it is that you need to hear in the moment you find yourself in.  And I can see that what I am hearing may very well be different to another person’s interpretation of them.  I think of it as something almost akin to magic.  A trick of the universe.  It is capable of guiding us through personal times of crisis and joy, and no matter what are ages are. Songs can have multi-layered interpretations.  I see the writers of strong lyrics now almost as mystics, or at least conduits, through which universal inspiration and knowledge is able to flow.  So many of the songs that I had chosen to put on my iPod, and then on my iPhone, suddenly became alive, and I seemed to hear them properly for the first time after Elle died.  Yes, I have added quite a few new ones, but mainly I had them all the time.

This particular song was requested by my good friend, Claudia, one evening when we sat outside listening to songs following that August 2016 fateful moment.  She was our rock, support and comfort during the worst time in our lives.  She is also Elle’s godmother, along with another dear friend, Ann.  The synchronicity of Claudia’s unexpected arrival to join us in Galicia has not been overlooked.  Claudia has had her own share of pain, and was able to step out of it, and give support to us in ours, even though her pain at the loss of Elle deeply felt too.

About a week after Elle died, Peter, Claudia and I were sitting out on a barmy September evening listening to our favourite songs together, while a few of Elle’s friends relaxed around us too. I was already collecting a list of favoured songs that later developed into our Elle playlist, which continues to build.  One of our evermore personal favourites is a song called Courage by Villagers.  This particular song was sent in an email by Elle in the August of 2015 to Peter, Kate, Heather, Greg, maybe a few others, and me.  The only people who listened to the song, that I know of, were Greg and Heather.  A few days, and while Heather was with us, something nudged her to ask us if we had listened to it.  No, was the answer, and I went straight to my laptop and searched for emails written by Elle, and there it was – a link to the video.  The first thing that jumped out at me was that it had been released on Elle’s birthday in 2015.  I heard the opening lines and had to stop it.  I waited a few months before I could open it again.  It now truly renews our courage at those opportune moments when it leaps to the top of our playlist.

But back to the story I started telling.  Claudia asked us to play one of her favourite songs, Killing me Softly, by Roberta Flack.  While it hasn’t been a favourite of mine, Peter couldn’t stand the song.  But nevertheless, because of how we were all feeling and what Claudia meant to us both, it was going onto our Elle playlist.  Some months later, when it once again popped up, I heard something new in the lyrics, and suddenly the song came alive.  Now it was me going through the darkest of times, and I heard there was a young boy everyone was talking about.  I sought him out, and found him sitting crossed legged on the bank of a river, and as I approached him he started to ‘speak my language’. He caused my life to play out before my eyes as he gently stroked my cheek.  And the more he stroked the more I saw, and the more I saw, the more knowledge I gained from my travels though life.  It wasn’t easy having to see all the mistakes I had made, and there were moments when I wanted him to stop, but he just kept on going.  When the moment was over, I knew what I needed to know about how to face forward, and head on into the light.

I couldn’t resist looking up the provenance of the song.  Quite a story!  The music is by Charles Fox and the lyrics by Norman Gimbel.  Being only interested in the lyrics I went straight to Gimbel, and it became apparent that there was a third involvement, Lori Lieberman. She had just started college in the US but was already gaining a reputation as a singer/songwriter.  Around the age of nineteen she got signed up, through Fox and Gimbel, to Capital Records.  According to Lieberman, she had been at a Don McLean concert at the Troubadour, and she had had a ‘moment’ listening to his song, Empty Chairs, where it was as though he was singing directly to her.  Gimbel, a man of forty-three, had become her boyfriend.  She contacted him and asked him to come over to the club as she had written some thoughts on a napkin, and she thought there was perhaps a song in it.  He joined her, and the song started taking form.  He contacted Fox, and together they continued to all meet up and work on the song.  She decided to record it on her first album, and being a much more innocent era, plus her youthful naivety, she never asked for a credit, and was never offered one.

Her version of the song was rising on the charts, but Roberta Flack got to hear it, and decided to do her own version, and this went huge, leaving Lieberman’s gentler and less produced version to drift into obscurity.  Lieberman, after minor success, and then becoming disenchanted with the music business, left it for a couple of decades.  Later, with encouragement, she returned to the studio with her songs, and has since increased her audience such that she has recorded a number of new albums, and gone on to tour with them, including to Europe.  Interest grew around a controversy about her involvement with Killing Me Softly, and Gimbel attempted to kill her version of events. But ultimately an article was located, written in 1973, in which he talks at length about Lieberman’s involvement in the writing of the song.  Don McLean also supported her version, and a TV appearance around the same era finally confirmed Lieberman’s story.  And mine is done too.

Killing Me Softly with His Song

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him, to listen for a while
And there he was, this young boy, a stranger to my eyes

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

I felt all flushed with fever, embarrassed by the crowd
I felt he’d found my letters and read each one out loud
I prayed that he would finish, but he just kept right on

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly, with his words

 

Songwriters: Norman GImbel / Charles Fox

Killing Me Softly with His Song lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

 

 

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

I realise that today’s writing may cause offence, but in spite of my fear I will continue to say my piece.  It starts with the question: what is the difference between tits and bums?  Being on the older side of young I hadn’t heard of ‘upskirting’, until it was almost outlawed.

I feel alone in being satisfied that the criminalising of ‘upskirting’ didn’t pass through the House.  It feels wrong to me that someone should be criminalised, or possibly even sent to jail, for behaving in nothing more than a disrespectful way, where no touching, no drugging etc has taken place, just disrespect.  I am not saying that it is acceptable to disrespect those who wear skirts, and I think most girls, or boys, are capable of defending themselves in this practice, and I cannot see what difference it makes whether one is wearing a normal pair of panties or shorts under their skirts, which more often than not are just below their bum cheeks anyway.  My concern is which Disrespect will be the next criminal offence.  We are moving in a dangerous direction here. If this is a crime I can just see freedom of speech coming up next on the agenda.  It is already badly eroded.  Without freedom to express ourselves, what is there left of us?

I should imagine most skirt wearers are wearing underpants, and really all that is happening is someone ends up with a photo of the top of their legs and then the panties.  Haven’t we been wearing bikinis and thongs on the beaches for years now? How about the indignation of having the wrong man stare at your cleavage?  And for goodness sake, here the tits are actually pretty exposed. Is a pair of panties that revealing? Most young people have been watching porn together for years.  This is far more demeaning than a picture of the tops of someone’s legs.

The world is going mad, and if we can’t have reliable rape charges stick, or easily separate who is the victim and who the perpetrator, can you imagine the legal mess that could come out of a law that makes ‘upskirting’ illegal.  We need to get real.  What we have is more and more young people growing up with no limits, no respect for others and for those who are different, for whom watching pornography is not much different to sitting down earlier with their children for a Disney movie, and who seem to have lost all contact with consequences always being attached to all actions.  No god, no inner journeying, no matter, don’t care, pass the cocaine.  Or, no god, no one cares about me, no inner journeying, no matter, don’t care, some anti-depressants please.

Amongst the young people I know, many have been raised by parents who teach their children to respect others and their property at least. I see that some are spiritual and some are not.  I also see that those with healthy passions, like carpentry, music, knitting, singing, writing etc, find purpose and a direction in life, which isn’t always via a spiritual path. Some grow, through hard times quite often, while others flounder.  Nobody can, or should, force a spiritual path on someone for whom it feels alien.  But for those who aren’t spiritual, I do see the additives to their struggle to find a meaning to life.  Since the demise of faith there is a growing disconnect in communities and between communities, and a rapid rise in unkindness and selfishness in society.  Is there salvation on the horizon, or are we heading down the tubes?  I am interested to see what happens next, but I may not be around long enough.  Perhaps I will get a bird’s eye view – ha ha.

The name of this blog can’t help but bring forth good memories of a lifetime ago spent coming and going from a beautiful estate outside of Stellenbosch, called Old Nectar.  Ah, the synchronicity of everything!  But not the subject of my story.

It was the summer of 2000, and Elle would have recently turned eleven years old.  The car was packed to the gunnels, and we set off from Winchester for our holiday home near to Malaga.  I had made this journey a number of times on my own, but this time Elle had offered to join me.  The rest of the family chose the flight option.  I spent the ferry ride studying a map.  For some stupid reason I thought it would be a good idea to avoid Paris. Not a good idea.  We had caught an early morning ferry, but seemed to spend most of the day avoiding Paris.  Finally, we were making good headway, and driving down one of the tree-lined roads that always read as France, I realised we were running short of petrol.  Not a good idea, it would seem, during the lunchtime part of the day. All the garages were closed, and out of desperation, I stopped outside yet another chained off forecourt, and Elle and I wandered around the side and found the family having lunch.  I don’t speak French and tried out a few hand gestures to find out what time they reopened.  We were waved away with barely a glance in our direction.

We couldn’t afford to hang around, and I hoped that I had enough petrol to get us to the next town.  Half way there I lost courage, stopped the car under the trees, and tried to wave passing cars down.  No one was going to stop.  Finally a couple travelling in the opposite direction stopped and luckily spoke a little English.  For all the bad thoughts I had been having about the French, they turned their car around and told me to follow them to a mall where we would find a 24-hour petrol station.  Now Elle and I could continue our journey, and finally we seemed to be putting the miles behind us.  I drove and drove, and at last we were well into Spain.  Elle had spent a lot of the time playing Tetris on her Gameboy, and while I was quite proud of having reach 42,000 points once, I was amazed when she showed me her Gameboy.  Elle had exceeded, in one go, 100,000 points, and rockets were taking off all across the screen.  She probably never told anyone else, but I have a few times.

We drove past Madrid, and I just kept on driving. By now there seemed no point in stopping.  In three hours or so we could sleep in our own beds, and all through the next day if necessary.  Not far on the other side of Madrid, and about an hour from Granada, there is a mountain pass.  Going through it I realised that I was driving into danger.  I had begun to shake, and my eyes were doing funny things. Elle was determined to stay awake with me, and I truly don’t think it was because she was scared.  She rarely showed fear for anything until after her teens.  I said to Elle that I was going to find a bar where I could get a coffee, and then see how I felt about driving on.  I thought that this would fix me, and that we would probably keep going.  But having now stopped, I realised that I was putting both our lives in danger, and there was no option but to find somewhere to sleep, and carry on in the morning.  Where we had stopped was a large building next to a garage, with a bar and restaurant. Out front were many lorry drivers who were enjoying a late supper, having pulled up their lorries, probably for the night.

It was already full summer, and the night was incredibly hot and sticky.  After my coffee I went up to the bar and asked if there was a hotel nearby.  The man pointed up to the ceiling.  We could stay there.  This seemed like the best possible outcome.  We collected our overnight bag from the car, and then proceeded to follow the man up stairs, round corners, down passages and up more stairs.  It resembled a rabbit warren, and I wasn’t sure we would ever find our way out.  But worse was to come.

There were two single beds in our little room and a window that opened onto what seemed to be the backyard of a grouping of buildings, and later I found out that it was part of an old farmyard.  We prepared for bed, and yes, at least we did have an en suite shower room, but sadly, no air-conditioning or fan.  As we climbed into our beds I heard the tell tale squeak of a rubber sheet under the nylon sheets; the substantial type to protect the mattress from something or other.  I read but soon switched off the light, as reading was not doing its job of putting me to sleep.  And then it started!

A rhythm quickly developed.  Because of the extreme and suffocating heat Elle kept tossing and turning.  Every ten minutes she would throw her body in the air, turn over before landing, and that way prevent the sheets from coming with her.  Every twelve minutes big dogs would bark for a minute and stop.  Then a generator seemed to get going every twenty minutes and run for about ten minutes.  Interspersed with these regularities, people would walk in one direction or another down the passage outside our room.  I can only assume that a brothel was co-existing with hotel guests.  Finally, at any time in the routine, I could hear massive lorries thundering down as they emerged from the pass onto a straight road.  Sure enough, as we left the next morning, there was a huge articulated lorry rolled over and on its side, just off the road and down the slope.  There was no way I was going to get to sleep.  Eventually I gave up trying, climbed out of the bed, pulled a chair up to the window, and I proceeded to smoke, read my book, and when too tired to do either, just sat and waited for morning or sleep to arrive.  It was around midnight when we got into our room, and by about 5am I was astonished to hear the unlikely quacking of many ducks.  I listened as they got closer, and watched as they came into view, in a great gaggle, under our window.  There didn’t seem to be anyone driving them.  Is this what they did every morning?  OK, I thought, now all that is missing is for the cock to crow, and, as if it read my mind, it bellowed out its news that the dawn was upon us.  That’s it, I remember thinking, I can’t take another minute of this hellhole.  I dressed, woke Elle and said I need to go.  I was finished, but I had recovered somewhat from my mammoth drive of the previous day.

Elle made no complaints and was as excited as me at the thought of getting on our way towards our destination.  I promised her that we would stop at the next town for a decent cup of coffee and a croissant.  She always had a soft spot for pan chocolat.  I remember so well that little patisserie we found, and how we enjoyed the sense of normality that was creeping back into our lives.  That truckers’ stop was like a place caught in the cross hairs of reality.  If Madness was a town then that was it.

Around 8.30am we drove down our vertiginous long track into the home we all loved so much – our little paradise in the hills of Andalucía.  Greg was not expecting us to arrive until much later in the day, and was so excited to show us the finishing touches he and Mark, his boyfriend, had been working on for the last couple of months.

When I linger over precious memories like this one, just for a moment it is as if Elle still lives somewhere in-between.

Since I lifted the curtain on my depression, and gave it permission to pull faces at me, things have got weirder and weirder in the nicest possible way. Weirder and weirder definitely doesn’t mean mad though.  Wrongly or correctly, I have not allowed depression to show up in my life for decades now, believing that there are people who depend on me, and if I am crippled by depression, what does that tell them about life, and I may end up letting them down just when they need me the most.  That must not be the case any more as this time it feels safe to release it into the open.  I remember so well, as I began to experience an unexpected THC oil moment (one that I had walked myself into without realising what I was doing), that my very first thought, as it began to alter my mind, was how was I going to take care of those who may need me while in this state of losing myself.  My second thought was, I want to be at home where I shall feel safe during this loss of control over myself.  Not long after having these thoughts, and once I had made contact with Elle and heard that she was going to come and be with me, I understood that I needed to give myself over to the experience.  I surrendered, and opened my mind to see what the experience could give back to me.

I feel that there is a connection between that moment and now.  This depression is morphing into something tender and illuminating.  I find myself surrounded by important members of my family who are not afraid, and nor are they trying to steer me onto a different course.  I feel like I have gained their trust and patience.  I had a special telephone moment yesterday with one of my dear life compatriots, and later with Kate.  It feels like energy, a life force, is flowing back into my being. Last night I managed to go to sleep without any help, and whereas I did wake a few times in the night, it wasn’t too difficult to get back to sleep.  In one of my waking moments, there was a vision in my head.   There was a table and Elle was sat at it.  It was a comforting moment.  I should not feel adrift in a sea of nothingness.  I should not allow her death to create a widening rift between us. Time is trying very hard not to be my enemy.  This morning I awoke at six and felt like writing.  She is sitting at my table.

Close by there is a river of depression, swollen following a deluge of sad self-pity.  It threatens to flood the home that just happens to stand in its path.  Reminds me of my dream – the one where from drone heights I looked down on a beautiful valley nestled between the mountains.  Up the valley towards me stood a house.  I looked at it and thought, ‘but when the rains come, a river will flow through it’.

I remember the red velvet curtains that hung in front of the screen at the ‘bioscopes’ of my youth, and the excitement I felt when they started lifting away, and the music started up.  Well, a similar pair hangs somewhere in amongst my consciousness, and every now and then a corner lifts, and what I see looks like depression, and I feel a familiar turning of my stomach, but not in a good direction.

Odd sights and sayings will bring on these peep shows.  But by seeking out anything that qualifies as nature, and even an ant will do, I can quickly get that curtain to drop back down, and hide what I don’t want to see.

Depression, and bi-polar, is so ‘normal’ these days that doctors in the UK have been advised to give out anti-depressive tablets pretty much to anyone who says, “Yes, I think I am depressed.”  We are even being told that children as young as four years old are suffering from depression, and receiving medication for it.  I can’t help thinking the world has gone crackers, or at least turned inside out, as experts gather on news programmes to discuss this shocking statistic.  Their answer seems to be, for the most part, let’s medicate this problem away. Absolutely no in-depth understanding of what they are dealing with at all.  No longer are we able to sustain ourselves – it seems like this is now virtually ingrained into our children.  We have become what Jung and Nietzsche foretold – cardboard cut-outs – and puff, we all fall over.  Try to get one of us to stand up and say, I am Jack, I am strong and I believe in myself.  Or, I am Jill, I am powerful like the wind.    We are all too busy being bi-polar, or suffering with body dysmorphia (BDD), borderline personality disorder, OCD etc etc etc.  If there is nothing we can do about this, and it is more than psychological, then what the dickens have we done to ourselves!  In my view, and there are many who think the same, with the disconnect from ancient mythologies virtually complete, and a lack of respect for religious beliefs and the people who hold them, and therefore no contact with, or knowledge of, the all-important archetypes that show us who we are, and how to be better versions of ourselves, we have become two-dimensional beings.  As Jordan Peterson would say, the only hope for us Pinocchios, with our uncomfortably long noses and donkey ears, is to swim down into the deepest depths of the darkened and unexplored oceans, and be prepared to die.  Then perhaps we may have an opportunity to enter the mouth of the whale (the anima) in order to seek our father (the animus), and once we are connected, individually and communally, again to something a little more real than this virtually virtual world of today, only then and perhaps, there is hope for us, and hopefully for our planet too.  A rebirth, the Rebirth perhaps!

I am not qualified to discuss what depression is or how to treat it, and can only comment from a personal point of view.  I have experienced it myself during my teenage years, and through my twenties, and I have also witnessed a lot of depression first hand, either through family or close friends.  Without a doubt there is such a thing as serious mental illness, but then there is also whining. With the benefit of hindsight, my teenage depression had more to do with feeling alienation from my peer group, and a sense of not conforming to the model of a teenager that I would have preferred to be.  I wanted to be something other than who I was – as common today as it was then.  I wanted to be more like the girls who were spontaneous and having a lot more fun than me, or so it seemed to me.  And there was no social media to blame.  How convenient to have something simple to lay the blame at the feet of, instead of having to work a little harder, or look a little deeper inside ourselves, as to what is going on.  I was intense, self-conscious, took everything so seriously, and I was afraid to be found lacking.  Why would anyone find me interesting enough to want to have around, or to ask out on a date?  Would I find something interesting to respond when someone asked me a question?  All of it is really normal teenage angst, and along with bullying, nothing much has changed there.  What may have changed is that teenagers see they have platforms that can make them noticed, or even famous, and this encourages bad behaviour.  I think what has changed though is parenting.  We lost our way because we have no Way or Path to guide us.  We have not given our children direction, conversations about things that matter (they have all been too busy watching TV and playing with their phones etc so that we could do a bit more of what we want to do), or made them feel safe by giving them ground rules and barriers.  We also have not shown that while there are things to fear we cannot let fear take us over, and all the other principled things we could have taught them.  What seems particularly lacking is the one that says there will be consequences of any choice you make, so think before you act.

It makes sense to me that depression should serve as a road sign.  It tells us there is something we are not dealing with, something perhaps that we are repressing.  Get it out of its box, and take a good hard look at it.  See what it is ‘covering up’.  But would you take the time and trouble to venture into uncomfortable and often painful territory when you don’t believe there is a purpose to life?  Why bother trying to find that better version of yourself, with no guarantees on offer, if tomorrow you will be gone, and the next day forgotten?

We need to ask ourselves why Voltaire said something along the lines of, ‘If God didn’t exist Man would have to invent him.’ I have often heard it used as a mantra by atheists, but what is less commonly known is that Voltaire was a believer:  “What is faith?  Is it to believe that which is evident?  No.  It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.”  That is how it is for me.  Most importantly, he believed in the oneness and connectedness of everything, hence his belief in there being one ‘father’ for us all no matter which religion you belonged to.  He also firmly believed in the separation of church and state – absolutely vital as humankind has created most of what is religion, and all that is truly religious has little to do with laws, and more to do with truths.

And also what did Nietzsche actually mean by ‘Man has killed God’?

I think I am right in expressing the view that he is claimed as a leading light in the atheist parade.  But when I read The Parable of a Madman (contained in The Gay Science, written in the 1880’s, both before and after Thus Spoke Zarathustra), it struck me as profoundly spiritual, even prophetic.  It has been said of Nietzsche, behind the destroyer lies the creator.   I felt his deep concern for humankind’s future when he wrote:  “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? … Is not the night continually closing in on us?”

The ‘mad man’ is carrying a lit lantern during the day, and he says we will all need to do so now.  In killing God we lost our sun, our source of light.  My God is a vision of light, and if white light is the sum of only seven distinct colour ranges that we can see, then God’s light is as if there were an infinite number of colours creating the greatest light ever.   At the end of the parable ‘the mad man’ bemoans the fact that he has come too soon, and before anyone can understand his concerns.  I am grateful to Nietzsche for helping me to identify an unusual, and not welcome, sensation I get when entering churches, which is as the madman predicts – they are as tombs and sepulchres of God.  I may even feel more comfortable in churches now that I understand this better.  I never really felt the presence of a living light in them.  In saying that, it does not mean that they are not Holy places.

It is at this point that I intend to put my money where my mouth is.  It is time I opened up the great anger inside myself, and once and for all confront it. It is time to find out if depression is, as I say, more to do with a) disappointment, whether in life, in someone or in one’s own being, b) sadness, either for one self or for the planet or such like events, c) grief over loss.

As I said at the top of this piece, I have been aware for a while, and it has been brought home to me more clearly since Elle died, that there is something that causes an occasional ripple through my chest.  Now and again a wind blows through, and lifts the corner of that curtain in my mind.  Behind it I can just make out a gremlin or two – the gremlins of depression that curdle everything they touch.  Sometimes I manage to look away after a short flash, and the feeling is dissolved as quickly as it appeared.  And yes, I do believe that we have choices.  To deal with it, or not!  It is as simple as that.  I haven’t wanted to until now, but it has built up into such an anger that I have no choice but to deal with it.  I do not, and never have wanted a sticking plaster, or a muti that anaesthetises.  I am both my daughters’ mother in that regard.  But now it is time that I wrestle those gremlins to the mat.

My anger is darker than twenty thousand leagues under the sea.  It has more spikes than a depth charge that is waiting to blow up the submarine that took me down there.  Who am I angry towards?  I have no one I can point a finger at really.  There are so many of us who could have made a difference to how things turned out for Elle in the last days of her life,  but not one of us did, each for our own reasons, most of which are quite innocent.  My reason for not rushing home was that I couldn’t bear to humiliate Elle.  I knew more than anyone else how important it was that she felt capable of taking care of herself, and in charge of her own adulthood.  She feared that her deep ties to us, her immediate family, was an indicator that she couldn’t ‘do’ her life without our help.  I am angry because now I know that that was such a misguided reason for not coming back.  I would be more than happy to take on her anger if it gave her another chance to have a go at adulthood and a future.  My anger is aimed at all of us who failed Elle.  I am angry at, but that doesn’t mean not also sad for, the driver.  Why wasn’t she watching the road ahead?  I hate that car!  I try to turn that hate to love.  I say to myself I love the pine trees on either side of the road.  They would have comforted and accompanied her as she was yanked away from life and us.  She was walking amongst them, hoping to find release and solace from the troubling feelings, sights and sounds that were overtaking her being. There were people who saw her walking in the dead of night, who didn’t stop to see if they could help.  They thought she was a ‘druggy’.  When I heard that I was so angry, but dare I think that I would have stopped to help a young girl in disarray, barefoot and walking along the road in the wee hours of the night.  I have never been asked to do so.  I believe there is a taxi driver who saw her, and deeply regretted that he didn’t stop to help either.

I am angry that she was torn away from us just thirty-six hours before we were due back home, and we, the whole family, as was her wish, were going to work together to make her feel whole again.  I am angry for the pain and anguish that blighted her last days.  I am angry that her sister now has to walk this earth without her.  I am angry that this is my and Peter’s destiny – to learn the length, breadth and depth of suffering.  I am angry that I understand the purpose my anger serves, and that I know that it can and will reveal itself to me if I let it. Why must I be so bloody correct always? And I also have some idea of how to go about a transformation of this anger.

Elle suggested I become spiritually more conscientious through the most gentle of inflections.  I wanted to, but never reached for it.  It is interesting that I finally admit something to myself – that the people I feel supressed anger towards are those who are spiritually active in their lives.  I don’t think this is a co-incidence.  Going back to my dream, perhaps the river that could come down the valley and through my home is my anger.  Anger is something that I have so rarely experienced.  I can count the times I experienced true anger on my hands and toes, and would probably have a few left over, and it is definitely not because I suppressed it.  I just do have a very long fuse.  On those few occasions, which I pretty much remember the details of, I would shake with anger, but what was also interesting was that I still never totally lost control of my actions, even though there were a couple of occasions where I wished I had let go more of it.  It has been cathartic for me to stare into the abyss of my anger.  Time will tell whether I have achieved anything by wrestling with it.  Or have I just been masturbating?

I believe that what most of us call depression is better described as fitting under the heading of trauma.  We no longer have the benefit of some magical entity ‘out there’ to share our loss or culpability with, no one to ask for help in the most private of ways, and no one who will point a finger at us and say “I saw that”, and remind us why it is important and beneficial to be good.  We are beginning to believe that there is no need to fear a link between behaviour and consequences.  No need to turn away from temptations that could lead you astray.  It is OK to stray.  It is OK to do what we like, how we like, and when we like.  Nobody is counting.  Fear ye not retribution.  Why bother with redemption.  Too hard, man.  This is a stone’s throw from losing any sense of the value of human life, never mind the rest of the animal kingdom or the planet.  What difference does it make to anything if a few more kids die in Syria, or there is another school shootout somewhere in the US?  And oh, chemical weapons are so much better – saves on the rebuilding of infrastructure.

I really never meant to get this dark. Reminds me somewhat of my favourite man, Leonard Cohen.  You Want it Darker is the name of his last album and of the title track.  There are so many ways of reading that.  I expect it to be a question while he presents it as a statement.  It works both ways.  I had a burning desire to write to him after Elle died, and I did.  I managed to get through, via the official website, to his lawyer, Robert Kory, and tried ‘speaking to Leonard’.  I wanted the man I admired most, both spiritually and artistically, on the planet to know the extraordinary girl whose light had now departed our world.  He seemed the right person to tell.  It filled me with joy at the time to just imagine I was talking to him.  I didn’t know he was in such physical pain from a fracturing spine condition, but his son, Adam, talks about the great joy he was still capable of feeling as they worked together on bringing the album to completion.  It was made in his living room and apparently sent by email to the production team.  I don’t know whether he ever saw my emails and photos, and I suspect, and rather hope, his son protected him from me, but there again, maybe he did glimpse them.

I thought I would end on a lighter, more joyous note, but sorry, that is not to be.  As to my reticent depression, highlighted by a palpable anger – I have lost confidence in the world of today.

Oh, and the name of this blog?  That’s easy – the collective name for almost all the tribes of modern humanity that have only recently emerged from the long grasses of the African plains.  We continue to do what we have always done, namely, throw the baby out with the bath water in the name of progress.  We chose to turn our backs on all that was good about our more primitive and simple selves, some examples of which still exist in the tribes who have resisted our form of progress.  All we know how to do is talk talk talk.  The vast majority of us don’t have a clue about who we are, why we are here, or how to deal with the great fat emperors and empresses with no clothes on.  How do we deal with their nakedness when we don’t know whether we are clothed or not?!  We need to ask the children.  I am hoping they can help us.  I am struggling to keep my half empty glass half full.

But, at the end of the day, if not today, then perhaps tomorrow, I know my anger will pass and my depression dissolve, and I will not miss those gremlins.  So until the next time that they have something to remind me about when I will look to the source of any irritations I feel, I will check myself if found judging others, and finally I will do things that calm and replenish the soul, like meditation and rituals.  And I will report back.  I am not looking for a miracle end to my grief.  I am only looking to alter the course of my depression, and to soothe my anger, so that I can return to being worthy of my own respect.

Finally, I want people to know that I am not pretending to have read Voltaire and Nietzsche.  I have learnt about them the easy way.

Article on anti-depressant long-term use and side effects of withdrawal:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac-cymbalta.html?emc=edit_mbe_20180410&nl=morning-briefing-europe&nlid=8132181320180410&te=1

A quote from the article:

“We’ve come to a place, at least in the West, where it seems every other person is depressed and on medication,” said Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. “You do have to wonder what that says about our culture.”

Elle, while attending Goldsmiths in London, came home with an instruction to write a few haiku for her next English seminar.  We talked about what they were for a while, and she said she was off to the park to think on it.  A little later she showed me what she had written.  I am always surprised at what my children are capable of.  I told her I thought they were excellent. I have always loved haiku.  They seem to be like a verbal out breath and a gentle ‘aha’ moment in the last line.  Traditionally they are an observation based on nature, and there are three non-rhyming lines, and a 5-7-5-syllable sequence. They can vary these days. It is so like Elle to have changed the syllable order!

Below are her three haiku and her notes for the seminar:

‘These are 3 western Haiku. I tried to capture an examination of nature by visiting     Hyde Park, but was struck by the artificiality of London’s nature. Yet I observed a stunted, unattainable power that seemed to exceed the confinements of the park. I experimented a little with alliteration and sound, mainly in the second poem, trying to create a ‘k’-‘sss’ sound, imitating waves on a shore. I wanted the first line of the third poem to create staccato pronunciation to give a sense of discomfort and prolonged emphasis.

Obscure miniscule creature

Little ugly bug

How often have you been seen?

Wind coins consistent current

Does Richard Wilson*?

Or study simply too still?

Moss coat concrete water bed

Mask on mask on face

Mother’s hand grasping gasp

*Richard Wilson: Artist: Saatchi Gallery: Wilson’s 20:50. “The gallery is filled to waist height with recycled engine oil, from which the piece takes its name.” ‘

That would have been in her twentieth year, so therefore 2009. A couple of years later, while Peter and I were in South Africa, and after Elle had moved to Ibiza, she sent us the following email.  I suspect she was filling in time while looking for work on the island.

“Everyone here is going to hate what I am about to say, but I think that my poems are the best, and that no one has had the eye to hover over them long enough to realise it.

I wrote these poems as I sat in a moment of shallow and superficial despair, and in knowing that this work had to be done, I was able to escape the world by observing it. I watched a ‘bug’ long enough to begin to really see it; what is this creature? And who has taken the time to look at it? And then it hit me, I was probably the first and last person to see it, or at least to watch it for longer than a few seconds at the most. This ‘minuscule creature’, a mere ‘ugly little bug’, then became a metaphor for a larger world we live in; an ‘obscure’ world, foreign to our own individual little worlds that seem of such importance.

In the second Haiku I continued with this trail of thought by creating an opposition between the natural world that has existed and been developed throughout time with the world that we ourselves have created and developed. Two detached worlds that capture the zeitgeist of our time. In referencing artist Richard Wilson, not only am I relating his own works to the subject of the poem, but I am referencing the currents, zeitgeists and interpretations of society that the arts have stimulated since their beginning. The reason for this being that we have created a literary world within a world within the world, “a mask on mask on a face”.  The literary world is a reflection of our world, a world in which our currency is symbolic of nothing. Over the generations, humanity has created a world on a foundation without substance. It is all smoke and mirrors like Richard Wilson’s work. Unfortunately, we are so absorbed with our own problems that we rarely have the time to relate our own microcosmic perceptions with the larger macrocosm. And then furthermore lack the time or the ability to question the reality of that macrocosm. As a a result, to our ignorance, the ‘ugly little bug’ goes unnoticed.

I could continue to discuss the relevance of our smoke and mirrors man-made world in a post-apocalyptic scenario, when civilisation ceases and all that remains is the endeavouring planet. A planet that has been so hospitable while we play and destroy. But I do not have the time or the inclination to preach to a room that did not have the time to observe a piece of writing that they deemed insignificant because they lacked the vision to see any value in the unfamiliar or unconventional. This exercise has proven the subject of these poems. If anyone thinks their work is better, I am open to persuasion.”

I thought that I would push myself to have a go at writing a couple of haiku, and I have gone for one 7-5-7 sequence and the other 5-7-5.  My little obscure link!

My heart torn into pieces

Tears away at it

Fly above and beyond now

Who has less cries less

Who has more wants ever more

Tears away my love

I am adding (21 June) a new haiku, which is in response to one Elle wrote, and came to me directly following an interaction between a bug and me late one night.  It settled on my iPad, as I lay reading in the dark.

Little bug I see you now

Oh the Bhodi tree

Fly away and on with me

I am currently filled with remorseless self-pity.  I suspect this streak will continue until after Elle’s 29th birthday.  My anger knows no bounds today.  Scatter and be gone.