The Therapy Resulting from a Lizzy Palmer poem

I exchanged a series of pieces of writing with Lizzy Palmer in 2015, the below was the result of one  particular exchange that resulted in an unexpected and genuinely surprising reaction...

The Therapy...

[…]

Mp: I had just woken up and I felt sick when I read it.

BW: Yes?

Mp: Well… I wasn’t expecting it… it was like something coming in from behind me with a knife and… and I didn’t see it coming… I hate not seeing things… It felt like she’d got into my memory.

BW: Yes, what kind of memory was it?

Mp: A good memory, something I hold to my breast… something I cling to.

BW: Yes?

Mp: But what if I was wrong [about the memory]. That thing that seemed so certain and so romantic was… disdainful… What if it was a theatre production? All that pretense, playing a part… in a romance that never existed.

BW: Yes?

Mp: Giving love, intimacy to someone that doesn’t want it – doesn’t know what to do with it… thrown back in your face. “Love is bad, love is wrong… disgusting almost.” It is something you give, that you don’t have, to someone who doesn’t want it.

BW: Yes?

Mp: Maybe it’s in the giving… I mean creatively I understood it [the poem]… but it was more than that – something I didn’t control or understand. Inside my memory, changing it, suddenly it seemed like a foreign object inside me, a strange… infected object.

BW: Yes?

Mp: It used to be safe… it was always there… I could rely on it [the memory], it was never far away… now it is gone… transformed… she took it…

BW: Yes? And now it is dangerous, and new, and not yours.

Mp: They always take things from me… I always feel that they take things from me… I have lost control of it. It’s not mine anymore…

BW: Yes?

Mp: It [the memory] doesn’t belong to me anymore… and It really got me when she called me ‘Marty’ because it was affectionate somehow… personal… like she was taking it without knowing she was… like she was doing it with…

BW: Yes?

Mp: …love…

BW: So it was a good thing?

Mp: …

BW: Yes?

Mp: It was a good thing… maybe it was less an infection and more a new opening…

BW: Yes?

Mp: …Maybe she is the antidote… she tore up the script… I tore up the script… is this not what poetry is?

BW: So you can write a new one?

Mp: So I can write a new one… and learn to love it afresh.

[…]

Email to Lizzy Palmer on the above piece – 13^th March 2016

It aint very polished, but that is the way i want it i think. I think it will require a bit of context. Of course in the piece you are actually a mere symbol acting in relative terms to the structure of my fundamental phantasy - that tentatively being that people (with a special caveat for those closest to me*) are thieves trying to take something away, some mysterious tenet of my being that not even I comprehend but am terrified of losing. This is of course sewn into the Pettitt genealogy (my mother being a hoarder of physical objects for instance - in constant fear of someone taking something away from her - that first toy taken from her by her mother as a child), this is our tragedy and I like to think the piece I reacted to went some way to cementing the realisation within me that letting things go is not only necessary but also terrifying and beautiful. This is what you are and where you came in within my imaginary and symbolic relationship to the world: the one that removes the linchpin and reveals the Real, the chaos beneath, that it is imperative that we love in all its monstrousness in order to create anew; but I'm sure you knew that already ;-).


Hope you had a spiffing weekend

Mp

*"Even the dearest that I loved the best/ are strange, Nay, stranger than the rest..."

A View from the tramp

The last notion ever to effervesce

From the non-knowledge of the globe

Consisted of the fact that

I...
Would manage to share your misery.

Wherever I went you were there,

Existing [that is all]...

Through all the small out-of-place things;

An obscenity, an Über-voyeur of anxiety,

Wrapping a world into an innocuous lump,

Waiting to be consumed by that scaly void.

But you don’t laugh or cry,

You just say:

“This is it – reality”, blink... blink.

To me that's just a chug chug of bass,

A dreary half-life dirge:

The soul stultifying fug of a non-

Composition; a No, a NO.

And when I think of you...

It makes me sad...not in a good way.

Fatal Chip Shop Strategy

I no longer want

To see things from inside

The same pillow, held.

From now on all is a ‘fatal strategy’.

Even standing in the queue at

The chip shop

Is a breath away from the

World sliding into extinction.

It must be taken to the end,

Retched out to a view

From from outside

The pit, where

There is only absurd

Laughter and one perturbed man

With a scoop full of stuff

That now has no meaning,

As he stares hopelessly

At the salt and pepper shakers.

Now

Last night: perceiving through liquid overflow.
Myself as the sound of too much chatter.
Now: The imagined ideas of staring others;
A backward twist of the belly blade.

The night we didn’t...

I found this in an empty folder on my computer, don't know if it's unfinished or perfectly formed.

You lured me out late

From that drunken hole

I had dug pretty deep

On the docile settee.

You said it was a night for danger,

So I changed my pants and travelled

Through the night on a train:

A pioneer with a can of cider for courage.

That night we didn’t know if the future

Was a minor chord floating on

A wisp of drunkenness...

Conversations with a Self

Where does it come from? You are always there, but would I miss you if you were gone? Would I be swirling around an emptiness, at least you are something I have, the rest are absences, and I cling to them, but you don’t seem to mind my faults and petty insistence. I’m a flailing thing looking for a tragic dream to follow – for now I have nothing, nowhere. Right now I am a nowhere and you are following me into its jaws. Don’t get hoity - pretend, think, idealise this image of you, now, you are a now, sucking everything into the plane of experience, everything souped up into an ecstatic presence. I could never be an everything, but it feels like a must. You can cry and it is something worth crying over because it is a tragic fate. Am I falling or being pulled into the sky? It feels the same, I’m going both ways. Creation isn’t always a perfect machine, sometimes it slips and you end up with an excremental facade – but at least you tried, took a heroic stab in the dark, an action more than the slumber of the hoi polloi; you are to be congratulated. I always think of the gaze, every little detail must be examined and made watertight against the poking fingers that could pierce a hole in the plastic bag of words. I am a control, I am a control. Predicated and captured in advance, too difficult. Jump, jump, jump like Klein. Who knows? They are all those infection bodies, pressing into a mind and scrambling you. Take it slow, we will be ok, as long as we have each other. We can always find a way, I promise.

It must be that simple.

The raw-ness of raw evenings,

And all the things you can’t say,

The utter pointless, swerve of

A future that is as stupid and undecided as you,

And the bombs will come and the children will die

And the images and films will be the same;

But there is never a reason.

It must be that simple.

It must be that simple

The greater good.

I always wonder what would happen if

The people who crowd the streets with

Such moral indignation,

And the obvious lick of the good and the true,

Were given their way,

Would utopia dawn, would a world of

Complete peace be the answer,

The completion of the dialectic?

No, but the point is the action

The pointless, heroic failure

Getting to the truth is not the goal

Knowing it won’t happen, that is the function.

The real reason for the horror is never

Defined and is probably dull and banal.

The conspiracy:

we live for the mystery

And the things they don’t say

Are the things in ourselves we don’t want to know.

So march March on, but know

You are walking away from the Real.