'Can you write this?'
Adam Phillips the celeb psychoanalyst has some things to say about
boredom, though personally I always his lose his thread, anyway I think
the point is that the lash of boredom (boredness?) is obviously an
excessive resistance, and most hopefully a point of possible growth or
breakthrough? Some free associating follows.
I found myself buying the Daily Record (Scottish paper) a few days ago,
to read all the gruesome details of that murder and mutilation of a
fourteen-year-old girl by her fourteen-year-old boyfriend. Maybe this is
too exceptional, psychotic a story to need fitting into any poet's frame
of language, to waste time trying to make sense of within an imaginary
that could empower some dissolution of such horror. (But I do feel that
everything about, you know, 'young people', who become increasingly
inexplicable to me in my olderness, is of the utmost importance. I
always value Rupert's references.) Another tack then: I picked up a copy
at Christmas of Douglas Oliver's Three Variations on a Theme of Harm,
secondhand. Yippee! 'The Harmless Building' is an astonishing piece of
prose, in which (among much else) the death of a Mongol baby (Oliver's
denomination), with implications of both negligence and cruelty, is
turned and refracted across different planes of comprehension: symbolic,
emotional, and real: the novella(?) ends with the writer (not the
'narrator') requesting that the reader forthwith send a donation to
Mencap. Another angle again: a great BBC radio documentary (also v
recently) recounted the progress (so far) or a young man with learning
difficulties (whatever that is, but you could hear in his voice that he
was 'slow', or 'different' in some way) and an early history of both
neglect and abuse. He was lucky enough to have decent foster parents,
and eventually to come into contact with a theatre company for
learning-disabled people, and its enlightened director, who recognised
in this (then) unprepossessing teenager something special. Having
performed, and participated in the educational work, now he was
directing his first own show, a devised piece that (among other things)
drew symbolic echoes both simply accessible and rather profound from a
theatrical practicality (a suitcase, so that the show could be toured
easily). He was not 'cured'; and he was working with a company of people
with like disabilities, and it was fragile, and a triumph, and its frame
and aspiration were achievedly artistic (not merely therapeutic or
whatever).
elizabeth
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