Category: mind

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the stream

Out in the world. Glasgow on a Wednesday morning, Victoria Road, Govanhill. Low grey cloud after a false forecast of sun. I wander around trying to reorientate myself. My friend’s vintage clothes shop has vanished. My favourite cafe has become a refugee centre. The record shop cafe has become a yellow diner, complete with smiley American staff. Is it really that long since I was down this end of the street? In Queens Park, the magpies are still there, strutting and flitting in their handsome assured manner. I wonder how long magpies live, if these could be some of the same ones I’ve written about before, sliding smoothly up and down between the grass and the treetops, smart white fans snapping open and closed. I admire their clarity of movement, their crisp definition, their sure self-possession.

Back on the street, the human world seems less certain. It’s as if the street is undergoing an unseasonal moult, changing its plumage in patchy fits and starts. Above several shop fronts, painted signage from previous centuries has been uncovered or recreated, and there’s a lot of new signage which is weirdly old-fashioned. Garish fonts and hues from earlier decades compete with the alternative trend of twenty-first century Nordic minimalism. Of course, the charity shops persist: ‘shop here if you believe in children’, which I do. I saw one with my own eyes this very morning and, as I write this at my egg-yellow table, a gaggle of teenagers stroll past, puffer jackets on backs, mobile phones in hands. They’re much more glamorous than we used to be, with their dyed and straightened hair and polished faces. We saved our make-up for the weekends, for the Saturday nights going ’round town’, cramming in as many pubs and vodkas as we could manage. I heard they don’t drink to excess now, for fear of being filmed and ‘shared’ online. Better for their livers, I suppose, but I liked the forgetfulness of drinking, the possibility of a temporary loss of self and time.

In my own case, I don’t need to drink to get that now. Incurring a brain injury four years ago has done it for me. It hasn’t been catastrophic – I’m not amnesic – but I don’t feel like the same person. New memories fade quickly and old memories don’t always feel like mine. Reality has a different texture and, at a subtle level, it’s difficult to maintain a sense of continuity. All the more important, then, to stay in the stream of things; to not try to capture the moment but to absorb yourself in it. I settle up my bill and step back out into the street.

Govanhill, Glasgow, Scotland
13th November 2024

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abroad

I’ve only realised now that I’m here, but I’ve come to a foreign country.

It’s not the language and landscape that are disorientating, nor the food and customs, unfamiliar though they are – it’s the activity. My friend has organised a busy week – travelling and meeting people and playing taiko, with new dojos and groups almost every day. In itself that’s not strange: two years ago a week like this would have seemed completely normal. But since my head injury, I’ve been able to do these things only intermittently, tentatively, and here it’s all so efficient. I’ve come into in a new world: a world of planning and execution, of intentions and actions, all smoothly following one another; a linear world of efficiency and efficacy, and of certainty – certainty in one’s decisions, certainty in one’s ability to see them through.

I look on in slight bewilderment at all these individual trajectories weaving around me, lines and curves lifting and looping and neatly intersecting each other. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of this world but back at home I observed it from a safe distance, hovering at the edges, lingering in the shadows, while I waited for my head to clear, for my nausea to subside, for my capacity for sure action to return.

But here these intentions, these trajectories include me and now I have to step out towards them; now I have to carry myself forth.

Tiger and Turtle sculpture, a rollercoaster walkway silhouetted against a rose blue sky in which the sun has just set

‘Tiger and Turtle – Magic Mountain’, Duisburg, Nordrhein Westfalen / North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
30th September 2022

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waves

Yesterday – For years I felt I was a gathering wave: all heaped up with nowhere to go and urgently looking for a shore to break on. Now I feel as if I’m a buoy on the sea, pushed up and down and back and fore in the tides and wind-driven surges, but essentially just held here in suspension – in motion without momentum – while out to sea the waves busily wash past.

I can’t get a grip on things, that’s the problem. Little things: dry paper, kindling, replying to emails. Big things: how to make a living, how to make sense of what’s happening to society, how to come to terms with what’s happened to myself. The thing with things is that they are too much. Even the little ones. Especially the little ones. A head-injured taiko player I spoke to online said that living with a brain injury is like having a hangover. All you want is comfort food and sleep and you know if you just ride it out it’ll pass. Except we’re still waiting.

Today – And then there are days like today when there is so much beauty: too much to take in, too much to give out. The sea is spilling over with golden blue light and in it all doubt is dissolved. For today at least, the waves don’t make me envious with their rhythmic fluid motion. Like me, they settle as the sun holds them, as the sun settles and holds everything, forever and ever.

Amen.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
19th October 2021

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notes on a head injury (3)

Writing is one of the things keeping me sane. With my words, I’m weaving a home for myself. In an increasingly ugly social world, I’m trying to make myself a shelter, a hidden place to heal.

A nest, a cocoon. A chrysalis. I discovered recently that some caterpillars turning into butterflies partially liquefy in their chrysalises, that they don’t just morph from crawling caterpillar to winged creature but return to primordial slime in between: holometaboly, a true transformation.

I’m thankful I haven’t turned to slime, or been reduced to a vegetable, by this bash on the head but I have subjectively entered a more fluid state. Reality feels much stranger, with my shrunken sphere of memory, and my sense of myself is dissolving. I can only hope that my imaginal discs – containing the proto-structures for the form that will follow – remain intact. In some butterfly species, future body parts covertly take shape even in the caterpillar’s early life. Perhaps the ideas that my mind will coalesce around in future are already in development.

It’s hard to tell though. It’s hard to tell anything these days. There’s been so much discontinuity – in my mind, in my life, in the locked-down, vaccine-pushing world around me – it’s hard to keep track. Hopefully, like the metamorphosed butterfly, when I emerge I’ll retain some memory of the time before. For now, I have to bide my time, and remind myself that, although the human world is in disarray, the rest of the natural world is just carrying on. This time of retreat is temporary.

As my eight-year-old self once wrote*,
‘When I come back out again
I’ll hear the birdie’s song’.

Indeed.

*From my first published poem,’The Butterfly in a Chrysalis’, which I recently came across in an old copy of my primary school’s annual magazine.

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
14th March 2021

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notes on a head injury (1)

I sit on my sofa-bed trying to read. I’m bathed in radiation, nestled between the soft light of the bulb hanging above me and the warm breath of the fan heater in front, but the comfort doesn’t console me. I’m trying to read the book which is in my hands, trying to catch hold of the words on the pages and find their connected meaning, but it’s difficult. It’s as if I can’t get in. My brain slips on the surfaces, lapsing instead of latching, and I find myself stumbling repeatedly over mysterious unseen obstacles.

“I begin with haard’dloq, extremely thin new ice that cannot be stepped on without danger, and then hikuliaq, new ice which is still slippery and yet can be travelled across.” *

Perhaps the subject matter isn’t helping and I wonder if it’s strange that I’m choosing to read about ice just now. It’s the season for it, I suppose, but it’s been a mild winter here so far. The temperature has rarely dropped towards zero and nothing has frozen yet. There hasn’t even been frost this week, the air being too wet and wild to permit any kind of stasis. I don’t think there’s much in our freezer either: the congealed mass of peas which I held to my head after bouncing it off a rock has long since been cooked and eaten. Nonetheless, I find it hard to get a grip. Words slide from the pages as I read, their crystallisations of meaning melting out of memory almost as soon as they’ve assembled, or sometimes before. It’s not that there are gaps – I’m not aware of any specific absences or elisions – but the greater order of things eludes me. On the rare occasions when I do manage to gather some sentences together, the reason for their proximity remains opaque.

Maybe I’m trying too hard. My consciousness is so clumsy at the moment, skiting across the veneer of the world ungracefully – and ungraciously. Yet, because or in spite of this, other things are drawing my attention. Maybe they’re always there and it’s only now I notice but lately I’ve been encountering all these little consonances; things echoing and repeating in different places. Photographs of snowflakes I see online recrystallise unexpectedly on the pages of a book, floods seep out of pages and into the fields around me, a phrase uttered by a character in an old Northern Exposure DVD is repeated by my boyfriend in the kitchen half an hour later. It’s as if different fields of existence are resonating, as if life itself is rhyming a bit.

I’m not sure what’s going on – if I am picking up on some subtle patterning or am simply confused. I’m certainly disorientated. Indeed, in some ways it seems that the world is inverted; as if I’m trapped on underside of ice and observing life from there. The most familiar things appear strange and at times I barely recognise myself.

It’s not just the brain injury, though that’s a big part of it. It’s also the lockdowns, the endless reiterating train of them: closing down, shutting up, holding in, keeping apart. Their effects are not just superficial. Like everything living, we’re not so much entities as processes – doings, motions, living veins running through the world. And when our activities are frozen and our moving stopped, we ice over, we ossify, we lose hold, not only of our livelihoods and of the human animals that we love but of our very companionship with ourselves.

It’s a discouraging time, all in all, but the consonances give me heart. Each time I meet one it’s like a warm touch, reassuring me that I’m still in favour with the world, still alive among its undercurrents even as I struggle at the surface. Indeed, during these moments I begin to feel a sense of belonging again; a sense that I’m inhabiting a deeper part of my brain and a deeper part of my body – a place beneath the stalled outer layers where my movement is more fluid, my contact more true. It’s a confirmation, a reminder, and a relief: that there’s life beneath; there’s always life beneath.

*Nancy Campbell, The Library of Ice (London: Scribner, 2018, pp. 112-3)

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
12th January 2021