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..."

Music in shops

The slack faced, nodding bodies move between the shelves with their lips muttering banalities of no great consequence.  Their fingers twitch as they reach for items waiting on shelves, they look vacantly at the vital information contained on bottles and cartons before either putting them back haphazardly or placing them in baskets or bags at their side. Occasionally there are kids running around and couples plodding around beside each other.  Sometimes friends are giggling and suited people, or some other arrangement of triviality, are sauntering around speaking on phones discussing some trite object or another. People are queuing, paying, beeping, talking of plans: picking up kids, a call centre argument, an errant colleague; hackneyed oblivious ego maintaining detritus.

What do we hear on the outskirts of the hubbub, providing an absurd gift wrap to this whole scene? A lone voice, a tender melody, the sounds of a soul reaching for that great void of love.  A song – music pumped in from a carefully selected selection, agreed on by official looking drones sat around big round conference tables. I’m sure I am not alone in experiencing that uncanny moment in a shop when you suddenly become conscious of the music and actually start listening to a song coming through the speakers that tackles subjects that seem like the most unorthodox of choices considering the current scene and the present context (see above).  

She sits on the corner of her bed; there was no need to turn on the lights, the faint seepage from the street is all she needs and the dull fug seems more relevant. She pushes back the hair form her face, it’s clumped and stringy from tears, her phone sit on her fingers like a dead fish, she looks at the words on the screen, she looks again, then it slips from her hand onto the floor and there it is, the hole, the truth, the utter impotence of her existence; the guttural place of pure indifference. She takes the pad from the drawer and falls backwards onto the bed and lets it fall out, things that shouldn’t exist burst into the world, a moment of purity and impossibility. The Real.

Is there a relationship between the two situations(the moment of creation and the moment of consumption)? Should there be? I realise that context is all in the infinite play of meaning and there is no right and wrong and all contexts potentially have the same value and can create new and unusual combinations.  However here’s my argument (my blatant logocentrism), I am privileging certain contexts (a lone listener sitting in a quiet room, the collective sway of the Dionysian concert goer) over others (the shuffle of the retail emporium). I’m not saying that there is something more present in the former, but just that it feels to me that some songs seem richer and more resonant  in certain environments, just as people are individuals that have strengths and weakness in different situations so does music. The shop atmosphere kills anything that is challenging, new and unusual about the music it plays and I know having to spend many hours a week creeping in between the thud and the whine of the shop stereo; or as those in-the-know call it the Mood Music. It’s a situation that hollows out meaning, seals everyone in an apathetic darkness; it’s a passive hand on the shoulder, a thought numbing distraction machine.  The economy can’t run on silence.

Some songs, however, are so trite and emotionally lethargic that providing a backing track to banality seems like the perfect fit – I’m thinking here of a lot of pop music that is lyrically lacklustre and Pavlovian in melody (Girls aloud – Sound of the Underground, Crazy in Love  -Beyonce), there’s no story-telling involved, it’s mainly repetition of a hackneyed vaguely optimistic axiom set to a catchy melody. Christmas songs are the shop song par excellence and they work to perfection, there’s no need to listen to the lyrics, there’s no thought involved, you can’t dance to it, it’s made to hum along to mindlessly, which it what I do sometimes and yes it’s fun.

Nonetheless, some of the songs that get played in shops surprises me, I often hear some of the more tender songs by Adele or Roxanne by The Police played, now the later is a song about a prostitute, and the lyrics clearly state: ‘You don't have to wear that dress tonight walk the streets for money’, but yet this is clearly suitable for all members of the family, except it’s not and in any other context it may be seen as a bit unsavoury and let us not mention The Thong Song or My Humps. The retail setting (and the prefix ‘pop’ in general) slaughters all meaning, it’s a vacuum where all is permitted, yet all is meaningless and tired; it empties out any significance and trounces on certain songs lessening their impact in other contexts. You could write a song about a pervert serial killer (probably called something like Bang Bang Stab Stab) and play it in the middle of the day in Top Shop over and over and I doubt you would get even a mild reaction form the 'audience'. Music overplayed in shops or on the radio is dulled and its mark rubbed away or, as Daniel Kitson might say, the overexposure has ‘put the poo on it’.  All must be laborious and inoffensive, it all just becomes blah blah blah and try fitting that slop into that special place of your memory where all is truth and joy.

I can’t imagine that when a would be artist envisions their song, that piece of themselves achieved with so much grit and determination, played to the masses, he sees a scruffy middle age man singing idly along,  scratching his nads while sorting through a crate for the best bunch of bananas at the same time as thinking of tits.  Although when trying to explicate this idea to my colleague at work, he simply said: ‘Bet they don’t care when they get the royalty cheque.’ I guess I never considered this, I presume this isn’t what the girl in the above scene was crying about – she’d just received a text with her royalty payment then set out to write a complaint to her agent. It just seems a tragic outcome, the transition from the intensity of the girl in her room to the obliviousness of the aforementioned nad scratcher. It doesn’t seem right, it shouldn't be about control and money but freedom and engagement.

For most songs let them play, but some should be kept out of the grubby hands of those Mood Music technicians. They want to control our moods for maximum profit and that is what it is all about, tilting our unconscious forces into a most conducive angle for the perpetual sliding of capital into the big pot. It all comes down to the tension between art and money, but some songs need to be protected or else listened to and taken in, a whole shop full of weeping eyes, or aisles full of jumping, dancing legs. That’s what I want to see.  

Without music life would be a mistake.

Without music shops would be a mistake.

Without shops music would be a mistake.

Without economic gain music would be a mistake.

'Emotional Rollercoaster'

Dear self

‘It was an emotional rollercoaster’

A man splattered with an ugly face and eyes whiter than the sun mouthing these words on the screen, summing up his team’s victory in the penalty shoot-out.

A girl, descending the steps of the court, describing her tumultuous legal battle, happy like a dozy canine.

A man surrounded by eyes so pure and adoring, casting these words as profound knowledge into dribbling mouths; his long and eventful travels through the world.

A robot, metal and empty, looking into the coming night, programmed with binary code, the 1 and 0 of mediocrity – a slow dull whirr and the words construct themselves. 

Rectal or loser

There is not a humanoid on any plane of existence that can convince me, with their useless words, that this fairground phrase, a worn out piece of carpet at the entrance to reality, sums up the complexity, uniqueness and multiplicity of any person or situation – indeed I’m also not entirely sure an interpretive dance would do the job, but no one has ever tried and this is the point.

The overuse of this expression, in all the blinding corners of my consciousness, is a fetid stain and sadness on my countenance. It makes me want to put my head in a blender then use the pulp to write an elegy to my soul on the kitchen floor. I realise this may seem like an overreaction, but with all the stringy sinews of my being (that vibrate with lucidity, played by the evil harp player in my head), the one thing I know is that it is not, because of what is at stake: the meaning of your existence.

Collate Errors

It’s like giving a loved one flowers or some such heart related product on Valentine’s Day – How romantic?  No No No! It’s not romantic if you have a gun held to your head being ordered to do it; of course the gun in this context would be a metaphor for expectation or, if you like, the superegoic pressures of society. The only way it would be romantic would be if you kicked the assailant in the nads or indeed grabbed the gun from them and shot yourself. Romance is chaotic, scary and a spontaneous act, not an obsequious and vapid gesture; if you choose to represent your ‘powerful and transcendental love’ with a husk empty of any unique meaning, I wonder what that says about you and your relationship.

Just as on TV or radio news when a tragic and unexpected death has occurred – you can almost sing along to the trite sound of the words uttered by the family member of the deceased – s/he was such a special/wonderful/talented son/daughter/husband/wife. I don’t doubt that they were, but the fact that you have chosen to represent them to the public and therefore the (big) Other (that judging unknown place where all utterances are addressed to and which holds the silence that begets the structure of your thoughts) with a laboriously repeated platitude makes me think the complete opposite; if they were that special render them in a way that shows their beauty, it doesn’t have to be words or interpretive dance, or dramatic in any way, just make an attempt at meaningful.

Oracle Err Slot

 ‘An emotional rollercoaster’ What does this phrase actually mean [holding it between quivering fingers and examining it before wrenching away in disgust]? A rollercoaster – Roller – Coaster – 2 innocuous and ‘pleasant’ words denoting ease and lack of resistance, but placed together and put in a context they denote that physical construction that weaves shadows around the participants of the fairground and can suddenly be used to suggest the trials and ructions, ‘the ups and downs’, of any situation that ever happened that was a bit hard to comprehend within a linear progression of emotion.

Nonetheless, its overuse renders it empty – an empty pot (dug up and reconstituted by archaeologists, seemingly filled with layers of subtle and profound meanings and a valuable insights, but basically just an empty pot, the same as all the millions of other pots brought from the ground, that maybe used to have stuff in them, but now they don’t and are destined to be looked at it through the glass of the museum). It is not insightful or interesting surrounded by so many multiples of the same.  It is perfect for those empty Valentine’s Day flowers though.

A Rollercoaster – a piece of mechanical engineering; a track designed to give the participant the feeling of danger and excitement without the risk – an entertainment. It is a manmade simulation. There is never really any danger it is all a construct with the full expectation of getting off at the other end. There is no reality; they were never really out of control. Just like a cliché, there is no danger of expressing anything new or unique.

It’s the Pavlov’s bell with the bovine audience salivating and chewing on their safe illusions like the herd munching on the cud. Emotion – an abject or ecstatic, indescribable force pounding through your body. The feeling and any uniqueness is pre-digested, a soggy molten mush – ding, nom nom nom.

Rear Cellos Rot

I’m being partly jocular of course; word’s can mean many things depending on context and use – I’m being purposefully provocative with my ‘interpretations’, but what I want to show is the rut I can get into with the light – to me it all seems the wrong way around.

The ‘rollercoaster’ implies a structure that humans ride to a resolution. The assertion that I want to make is that the phrase necessitates confusion between language and emotion.  People look into the words like little mirrors and see the something they think they recognise, they take that reflection stick that image like a pastry cutter over their emotion. The mirror image isn’t the real thing, it’s an image, a static, flat copy that seems to refer to something out there, but does not. The mirror is the out there that creates the thing it refers to. Hmm, What? What? What? Yes! Yes! Yes! Basically there is misrecognition between language (the structure, the words) and the emotion (that chaotic, fire-breathing, elusive wisp).  Those empty meaningless Valentine’s Day flowers are what create the affection and bond of the ‘powerful and transcendental love’, not the thing that refers to it. Platitudes, clichés, turn the Real within into a banality, a safe, fettered, loveless marriage with the silence.

Art Closer Role

Take your hammer and break that track of the rollercoaster you’re riding to bleakness, let yourself fall – jump off the rails of pleasure and free-fall into the wind of bliss.

All I’m really saying is it’s better to burn down the fairground than reduce yourself to the mechanics of boredom. Clichés are admissions with little bars, don’t lock yourself in; you don’t have to overhaul the planet, unless you are Socrates or Jesus, just piss into the darkness when it counts, create, innovate; you are not special, what are you trying to protect?  Hang your head in front of oncoming traffic, you might be surprised what happens.

MG