That's a fine and sensitive and thought-provoking post. One or two points I'd think about though, albeit pace Alison's response my
brains haven't so much melted as been turned into haggis, that's what a Burns night does to one, I don't think it's a matter of
'young people' being inexplicable to us 'oldies', I'm fifty next month while Vicky's a forty-year old granny and we misbehave more
than her sixteen year old son who tells us both off.
I do feel though that the vocabularies of poetic discourse and of poetry need to be challenged constantly and that it is an
imperative that they attempt to cover everything, as it were, an attempt that of course is doomed to failure. Ours but to and die,
so to say, he cliched away.
 Re disabilities, I think the primary thing for those of us who are not so afflicted is to learn: learn to listen, learn to see the
world through another's eyes. It's the little things that count too - I can walk with the pace of an express train but with Vics I
go at her rate, this isn't some special superior aspect of me it's just that I've learnt how to 'be there' for her, as a concomitant
I have a raised awareness of other disabled people, although too my attention or sensitivity to them is not as strong as it is to
one special person to me, but that's part of our human limitations.
 There, though, a humility that pieces our hubris that comes from such relationships as ours - if, say, you have to carry a forty
year old mother of seven to the loo in an 'emergency' because it's too far away for her to get to with her walking frame before she
wets herself you realise how embarrassing and humiliating such a condition can be, a person may be a fully aware and responsible
adult (well, at least sometimes!!!) but also have to occasionally need the attention required by an infant. Which does not mean they
can't be comical and feisty: something else I've appreciate about the disabled is their humour and courage, the jokes they tell on
each other are hilarious and their bravery is so quiet and everyday.
 While such experiences become a grounding in loving-kindness, but I better not get too preachy!!!

Thanks for a great post, Elizabeth, it was a pleasure to read.

All the Best

Dave



David Bircumshaw

Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/


----- Original Message -----
From: "Elizabeth James" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 11:04 PM
Subject: Re: Boring


'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