Somebody had to take apart some of these assumptions, point out the conclusions that can be drawn from the biographies of artists, and state the various ways in which both the negative and positive symptoms of autism could in fact benefit a life dedicated to art no less (or, perhaps, little less, or alternatively, no less, but less probably; all possible conclusions that may be drawn once the subject is further researched) than a life dedicated to science.

Some of these potential benefits ought to be evident to anybody who has worked with individuals on the autistic spectrum. Autism confers an obsessive tenacity. It can remove the distractions of social interaction which might prevent other artists reaching what they might think of as their potential. It provides a different take on the world, the alienation from it that can benefit a creative artist. Similarly, the very social difficulties that autism invariably provokes, as well as the difficulties of finding a place for oneself in the world, the comforts of a job and loving relationship, provokes exactly the kind of life crises that come up again and again in biographies as being the progenitors of a creative breakthrough. And then there is the fact that people with autism do not know how to compromise; their work is all there is.

Michael Fitzgerald discusses many of these factors. The book is divided into sections on writers, philosophers, muscians and painters each with as many as eight and as few as four examples of creative artists. Each artist is discussed in short more or less uniformly headlined sections of as little as five or six pages. Indications of Asperger’s syndrome or high functioning autism are evinced and briefly discussed.

Fitzgerald in his introduction makes the obligatory defence of posthumous diagnosis, which has been controversial since the success of previous such works by the likes of Kay Refield Jamison, whose work Fitzgerald indeed draws on. Since far more evidence can be drawn from the various biographies of long-dead individuals of note than in the interviews and from the school reports etc. demanded by a contemporary diagnostic consultation, since indeed far more social contexts are discussed in such a biography than the two (home and school for example) required in certain diagnostic criteria, and since the development of a given disorder over a lifetime may be evident from such biographies, there is surely an argument that, face to face contact or no, if such a diagnosis is not justified, then no diagnosis based upon contemporary consultation may be either. Were this not the case, the discussion of historical figures and their behaviours to shed light on the disorders they appear to exemplify would nevertheless be of interest to many who work with such disorders or are affected by them. If such defences must continue to be made, however, it might be preferred that they were made rather better than is the case with Fitzgerald here who, though he makes his case, somewhat tramples on it with a discussion of posthumous ratings of IQ in figures thought to be on the autistic spectrum. Following a discussion of the failings of IQ as an objective measure of intelligence, this makes such an exercise as the posthumous rating of IQ seem even more silly an exercise than it would appear in and of itself, and it is unfortunate that Fitzgerald traduces the essaying of posthumous diagnoses with such a practice.

Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s diagnoses themselves appear to be sound. (More so than many given by psychiatrists in the flesh in the cases of students I worked with at a college of special education were I to be drawn into a comparison, but sound in and of themselves.) In each case, I would be very interested in following up some of the biographical sources he draws on. Unfortunately, his discussion of each case is so concise, giving only those anecdotes and discrete items of evidence germane to diagnosis, that I do not feel I am, from this book alone, much informed as to the nature of each individual’s character and eccentricities.

On the other hand, if Fitzgerald does not go into a great deal of depth on each individual, he does provide sufficient examples of autistic individuals in each field to advance his thesis. If he had covered fewer it could easily be said by the usual commentators that these individuals, like Mozart, are exceptions that prove the rule. Also, such breadth as this ensures that each reader will learn something about figures he thought he knew, such as, perhaps, George Orwell and William Butler Yeats, as well as discovering new characters, such as Glenn Gould and Jack B. Yeats.

A look at those names may bring up another objection. From his selection of 21 historical figures, only one, Simone Weil, is female. This may reflect a number of things. Autism, of course, is disproportionately a male phenomenon. Historically, too, women, and even neurotypical women of high social standing, had far fewer opportunities to express themselves creatively. It leaves one question. Where the eccentricities of autistic men more tolerated, enabling them – with the usual life crises, ridicule, and difficulties, of course – to doggedly pursue their interests in the time they made for themselves, while women, failing to fulfil their more stringent social roles, were further disadvantaged, or are there many examples of female artistic genius out there waiting to be discovered and is this another indication of the autistic literature being slow to pick up on the experiences of autistic women.

Whatever the shortfalls, this is a fine book with which to begin to get to grips with this last taboo and, though it will be seen as a specialist interest topic, the viewing of the history of creativity through the filter of autism is as useful as any other more or less arbitary cross section of what would otherwise be an intimidatingly vast area, for throwing up interesting leads. For me these may be Glenn Gould, Bela Bartok and Jack B. Yeats, but each reader will have different names to follow up. Fitzgerald has written an engaging, well laid out book, and Jessica Kingsley has furthered its impressive reputation.

So, the hypothesis goes something like this:

Because of the increasing prevalence of highly refined carbohydrates and sugars in our diet, because of the high-yeast fast bake process, because of the shift towards milling of flours which removes all nutritional value, because of the over prescription of anti biotics by doctors and the use of prophylactic anti biotics in animal feed, the gut flora (the balance of “good” bacteria to bad and other strains), there is increasingly a problem of Candidiasis in Western populations.

Candida albicans is a common yeast-like microorganism which, given the right environment, and in a dearth of more desireable “gut flora”, can flourish, literally threading itself through the gut lining of suffers.

In itself it can cause a problem, releasing toxins. But this threading through the gut too can cause “leaky gut syndrome”, where particles that ought not to pass through the selectively-permeable membranes of the gut, can pass thorugh. Once they have done so they can in some cases interfere with the function of the central nervous system. In others, they can trigger food allergies which then further inflame the gut lining, decreasing absorption and leading to yet further problems.

To defeat this an anti-Candida diet has to be employed. I have benefitted from this myself, though I have never found myself able to persist in its strictures which involve the exclusion of all refined carbs (I couldn’t give up exercise, for one thing, which makes me crave carbs, I often say that if I had the organisational capacity to carry out the diet, I wouldn’t need it, and I have poor/non-existent impulse control besides). In addition, pro-biotics are important, to build up the immune system against the invasive organism.

While these necessary measures are being taken, though, something called Candida Die off occurs in which, depending on which theory you go for (to me the results are the same and so it makes little odds) either A> dying Candida releases the toxins that would otherwise be left inside or B> the Candida, now that the environment is more challenging, becomes more aggressive in order to bed itself into body tissues. In the process, you experience something called Herxheimer reaction (which also may or may not be the correct nomenclature). Essentially, this is toxic overload. You feel like hell, have all the symptoms of flu, including tingling skin (check), lethargy (check), sleepiness (check), and feeling cold.

Mine came on first a few days ago when I began eating home-made probiotic sauerkraut and took a probiotic capsule or two. I wasn’t quite getting it right. These measures should be rolled in slowly after the strict following of an anti-Candida diet. I hadn’t quite done this. My priorities and obsessions shift so much that I tend to be all or nothing most of the time, and I had come on too strong with the probiotics after too loose an interpretation of the Candida diet. (Another reason I have for believing this hypothesis incidentally, is the severity of the symptoms and the way they corrolate with how lax I have been in applying the diet, how quickly I move from eating badly to eating well – with or without probiotics – and how aggressively I introduce probiotics.)

In addition, I woke up this morning after sleeping badly last night, feeling like I had a cold. Though I had been shaky all day yesterday and knew I was coming down with Herheimer/Die off, I went for a fell run race starting at 19:15 and ran 4 miles with an 1100 feet climb. I came down and felt better than I had all day, but by the time it came to go to bed, I felt alert. My head was spinning. I couldn’t sleep until late, another symptom, now I look back, of Herxheimer. Exercise too helps to kill the Candida and I had ran pretty hard.

And so I have been achy all day, had loose stool (sorry), and felt too crabby for company.

Still, good and bad news. The good: I’ve still got a long way to go. The bad: I’ve found something that works, Sauerkraut and the fermented foods Natasha Campbell McBride believes to be so effective against such problems and the mental difficulties they can cause.

The only lingering bad in all of it, perhaps, is that tomorrow I’m off to do some Dry Stone Walling again and had hoped to chat to the Chainsaw Girl I met last time and who I have been daydreaming about since, but then, since I’m still profoundly ambivalent about relationships and siding, most times, with Gibbon (as Anthony Storr described him in Solitude) who said he often dreamed of being coupled, but was invariably glad to wake up from the reverie and find himself untethered, maybe that itself is no bad thing. All I’ve got to ensure is that I manage to cook something tomorrow morning!

Night Gav-watchers

Gav Belcher

This friend of theirs was a teacher, was convinced of her own intellectual brilliance, and had a tendency to micro-manage conversation until the whole evening became one long, dread, succession of parlour games. Who would we invite to the ideal dinner party (I hate dinner parties), Barack Obama apparently, to which my unenthused response earned me the assured “Don’t you read Time”. No, I don’t. Another such game led somehow to us discussing what would be our Mastermind topic. Hers was Elvis, and she issued a torrent of facts (and those justifications masquarading as facts that are never far from a true fanatic’s lips). B_____’s would be Rallying in the ’90s. His girlfriend’s, I think, would be something to do with the Berlin Wall. At any rate, one thing I took away from the evening, aside from my own unsuitability for company of any kind and my desire to be a perfect recluse, as I had more or less managed that half year, was that, though I had many special interests as fiercely obsessive as our Elvis aficionado’s that night, I was master of none of them; the fact that I had managed one tenuously assimilated fact about the Berlin Wall that night, and that I had for many years had an interest in precisely this period of Central and Eastern European history, and the Cold War seemed particularly stark, and I played a game of Solitaire Humiliations with myself for a long while afterwards.

Soon after moving to North Wales I was walking around Bangor, a University town, and indeed, a university town I could have lived in had things turned out differently – for most of the summer, awaiting A-Level results, I had indeed believed I would end up at my second choice, studying English with Creative Writing, and looking back now I could see for sure it would have suited me better – and taking a look at the Oxfam, I could not hold back from buying Taylor’s book on the very subject I had proven myself to not understand. One thought I depolyed against the compulsive purchase of the book was that I would never in a million years finish it. I don’t do well with such long books. The faltering motivation and shifting priorities of my ADHD see to that. But it was no good.

Two, three months on, I am glad of that. The book was a slog. I stalled on it numerous times and, though I left myself notes and To Do lists, and though I picked up the book again and again and pushed myself on, my self conscious re-focusing sessions were difficult. Something changed perhaps when I got one hundred and fifty or so pages in and the wall was built. Suddenly the recondite machinations of the various political parties and cabals were thrown into sharp relief by the very real human stories of the individuals and groups on either side of the wall.

Unusually for me I zipped through the next few hundred pages, reading them quickly for me at any rate. The realities of events in the GDR and the larger than life characters of those such as Lyndon Johnson, Walter Ulbricht, John F Kennedy, Nikita Krushchev and, more particularly, those lesser known but, incredibly, equally rare individuals, are for me more enthralling than any political thriller.

It may well be that the events were enthralling enough to keep me reading despite the lacklustre text. There were few passages where Taylor’s prose or delivery stood out and it struck me that perhaps at times the scarcely believable events could have been better served. Still, I am glad I persisted, and feel no less determined, at the end of it, that any future games of Solitaire Humiliations will not find me so ignorant of an area of history I should by now be pretty sure of.

Outside of the text I have a few of my usual bugbears. Acronyms and abbreviations can be opaque at the best of times, and histories concerning the Cold War especially so given the fact that many such are taken from the already perplexing initials of foreign institutions. At the very least I believe a history such as this ought to have a list of abbreviations used. Equally useful, though, would be a list of the key figures. It is not only those with ADHD like myself who may find themselves putting such a book as this aside for a time. It needs an investment of concentration and energy many people lack over a prolonged period. It can be difficult to remember a large cast of characters at the best of times.

Overall, though, reading this book has made me less intimidated by serious historical texts, less liable to persuade myself that I would be unable to make it through them, and indeed, more likely to persist. I may well seek out Taylor’s more highly rated Dresden, and try again with such texts as Timothy Garton Ash’s We The People and The Polish Revolution. Whatever my reservations, this itself must be a high recommendation.

In short I don’t know. Peace of mind it isn’t. Not in itself. Not by a long way.

Regret and self-hatred haven’t been strangers the last few days. Those fifteen to twenty years that needn’t have happened as they did. Those relationships that needn’t have foundered. Those mistakes that might perhaps not have been made. Those mistakes that keep on being made now. The complexities that have gone on in those long days, months, and years building up into my personality. The fact that the direct difficulties of the disorders I have had to face unknown and unrecognised have become outweighed much of the time by second-order difficulties of social functioning, of past hurts. None of these things are easy to ignore, or to simply acknowledge as passing thoughts in the mind.

Still your face doesn’t fit. Still you don’t know what to say. Still you speak and make no sense.

Still the handful of people who make an effort to understand are few and far between, and the necessity of seeing on a daily basis the people who don’t get it, don’t want to get it, don’t need to care, goes on, making life some days like the necessity of walking those last drudging miles home with failing light, aching bones and muscles and blisters rubbing on every step.

Still people take a kind of unfamiliar pride in traducing you in any way possible, feeling better for it, feeling morally superior for it. Because people like you don’t understand the social niceties everyone has hard wired into them, and so you need to be put down for it until you learn.

Every day you trust less.

Mud can make you prisoner and the plains can bake you dry
Snow can burn your eyes, but only people make you cry

It’s the end of the beginning, with a long fight yet. A long walk ‘home’.

- Clatterbach

Friday I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with traits of autism. While I might quibble with the diagnosis (I certainly have more than “traits” of autism, fulfilling all of the diagnostic criteria of Asperger’s as a child, with them developing in a manner wholly consistent with highly intelligent aspergic individuals, and indeed, consistent with nothing else), this is further than I have been for years.

In recent weeks I have been thinking a lot about my experiences with ADHD and autism. I would love to say I have been thinking of nothing else, but this has never been true of anything in my life at any period, however short, however long. Nevertheless, I have been working, as fitfully and as shambolically as I ever do, on a series of short pieces on ADHD and high-functioning autism, taking in my own experiences, and the insights thrown up in literature in such books as the late Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar whose concepts of number 1 thought and number 2 thought is as incisive a take on the brainstorms and reveries of ADD as anything I imagine I will ever read and demands serious consideration unlikely to be seen in scholarly publications. I began doing so simply to see me through what I knew would be a difficult period, the month from the first appointment with a specialist in Birmingham’s Barberry Clinic for which I was very late and very anxious, to the last one, on Friday, which I hoped, but doubted, would be conclusive. It proved to be that, and I am now waiting once again for medication.

The last year, like any year in my life, has been eventful, and ultimately unfruitful. The collection of short stories, Liquid Loves, I worked on for nine months in which I could not face employment in the minimum wage jobs I have done in the eight years since I gained my first class honours degree, remains uncompleted with many stories unfinished, and others brought to a hasty conclusion, filed away now with the thousands of other uncompleted projects on manuscript paper in a small filing cabinet, and on various computers. Other projects, similarly, have foundered, becoming either series of notes or collections of artefacts in the perpetual clutter around me.

The strangest of all of these projects may be this one, The University of Gav, but since it involves most of the difficulties I have faced in my life, and since, too, I have not explained it elsewhere and perhaps because I have a fondness for it still, despite its having brought nothing but disappointment, it might be worth going into a little here.

On the windowsill in front of me in the “Ever-so-Slightly-Uglier House”, as the UoG name for this place goes, is a ‘bird’s mouth’. A bird’s mouth is both the cut made in a tree to be felled on the side it is intended to fall and the wedge of wood cut out prior to putting in the back cut and felling the tree. It is a souvenir from a place I used to work a year ago, marked up 8/5/2009, my last day. It was the first tree I had felled on my own and, truth to tell, barely a sapling. Still it meant something to me, and, since it is still on view when most of my possessions, even treasured ones, get either buried under a constantly evolving, constantly moving clutter, it must mean something to me still.  The University of Gav was instituted at around the same time.

Not for the first time in my life, I was leaving under a cloud. In the preceding year I had broken up with a long term girfriend following some foolish desperate fling at work, took up with another girl from work with whom, since she had problems, I had problems, and the relationship was, to say the least, problematic, I had a turbulent year of every emotional extreme any man could know before being dumped and suffering all the gossip, malice and judgementalism an incestuous self-styled community within a small town can bestow on a man. Paranoia set in. I withdrew from everyone and decided, more or less consciously, that since I could not cope with relationships of any kind, and since the only enduring emotions I felt I had ever inspired in any but a small and shrinking group of close friends was hatred, suspicion and disdain, I would withdraw into reclusion.

That I did. For the first few months, aside from doggedly working off my month’s notice – something that reminds me, given the circumstances which could barely be described in a hundred thousand words, of the young spartan referred to, I think, in Turgenev’s Diary of A Superfluous Man, who, having stolen a fox and hidden it under his tunic, let it devour his entrails without uttering a single shriek – I locked myself away and turned away the few visitors I had, including my parents.

The anonymity of the internet seemed an alternative to the pain of trying to build up personal relationships and managing only, when using all of the intellect and tenacity that was either my due or hard won using whatever of these I was gifted with, only to attain and fail under the weight of the expectations of normal social function most people meet without any kind of effort. I locked myself away one day and essayed Second Life. Walking and flying (!)  some imbecile avatar around parks, university campuses, cities and landscapes which, even as ersatz digital reproductions were ‘not even wrong’ I found only it felt as unnatural and unsatisfying as I thought it would be, and that I still didn’t know how to break into conversations of the people who naturally fell into groups around me any more than I did in those galling breaks people insisted on having between bouts of the meaningful structured activity known as work they found so draining.

Another thing I did – it took up most of my time – was regret my entire life.

It wasn’t too difficult. I had hurt and disappointed everyone close to me. I was 30 and had never known anyone who had known me well and undestood me. One or two had come close, but I had made a hash of that. The one thing I knew I was good at, writing, could have been summed up by Kurt Cobain’s line “I’m worst at what I do best”: the ideas, the stories, the characters, came fully and for years had developed in my mind to a degree that, properly written, they could have, I know, survived on the shelves with the best of them, but, for reasons I could only ever face for a few hours at a time without being overwhelmed by the pain of it, I flitted as soon as the apogee of creativity had passed in my mind, and before I began to set out the story on paper.

I was broken. Depression is a feeble word for any one of the infinitely nuanced varieties of melancholy I have known in my life, let alone the harmonies and counterpoint of it when it starts playing out. Still, if you insist, depressed I was, as anyone would be.

Like Churchill in the “manic reactions” Anthony Storr describes in Churchill’s Black Dog I was never not going to bounce back. I had played rope-a-dope before plenty of times in my life, and used it to my advantage when others could not. My situation is, once again, too complicated to describe with the concision that would be necessary for me to reach the end of this piece, but I had no house, no car (I know this should not be important, but it was to me then), no money, no job, I was on my own and, if things continued, I had no future. But because of, not despite this, I started to think of every possible option, every outside chance.

I forget what they were, most of them. Back against the wall, I think of a lot of things. One, though, was going back to university to study. Czech language and literature was one possibility. Nutrition was another. And then there was good old English literature, what I had started out to study ten years ago when I had found it impossible to read one of a To the Lighthouse or a Hamlet, let alone a whole pile of the bastards.

I ordered prospectuses from the Open University. I looked into Czech courses at Oxford. No doubt I even looked into Charles University in Prague. (Czech always comes back to me, top of the pile, when I’m up against it; it seems to me then that I came alive in Prague and could do so again.) But, quite aside from the problem of money, I knew, deep down, I didn’t have the concentration for it. I knew that I could never, simply never, focus on a single subject for three days, let alone three years. Creative writing courses left me with the quandary that I would need to have a portfolio to get in. I didn’t have it.

And so, with a lot of ideas for symbolic craft-based projects involving home-made books and more or less literal analogues of samizdat publishing floating around in my head, there was the “recrudescence” of an idea I had had in various incarnations – Master Kidderminster, The Journal of Anger Management Studies etc. – a blog in which I could post fiction and which might, with an audience who could help to keep me on track, help me to finish projects, stories, essays, whatever. Ultimately, I was opposed to the idea of expertise, and to the formal education. I had suffered enough from the schematic ignorance of the former and had never, and would never, get on with the latter. And so, I came up with the idea of the University of Gav.

The UoG would function on several levels:

1. It would comically illustrate and also help me to track the many interests and fascinations that pulled me one way and the other
2. It might give me an audience
3. It would give me an outlet
4. It would let me, within a fictionalised framework of “modules”, set myself deadlines to structure my time
5. It could help me metabolise the difficulties and events of my life

Soon I had a concept, a couple of characters and a pleasingly absurb situation to set them in. Gav Belcher was the townie autodidact student. Named after a student from the ever-prestigious Wolverhapton University, a chirpie un-smug townie chancer who buzzed in to every recondite question to the frequent RP call of “Wolverhampton, Belcher” and the evident incredulity of Jeremy Paxman, Belcher was a grown up Master Kidderminster, a scruffy under-educated small town ingrate with more interests than eloquence, a seriously ambivalent attitude to authority, and a thoroughgoing apathy as far as deadlines were concerned.

Professor Gavin Belcher, was a gauche, absent-minded, tweedy professorial type who spoke in spoonerisms, malapropisms and confused digressions. He would develop to become a similarly self-educated man derided by more august institutions and mocked by his callow students for his verbal errors and his tendency to set the tassels on his mortar board on fire trying to light his pipe. With their mockery, he would become flustered, which they would, in their turn, see as a hilarious victory. Recently, he has taken to riding, and distractedly repairing, a vintage BSA M20.

While Gav Belcher is predominantly ADD, Professor Gavin Belcher is a little more on the aspergic side of things. Together, they are me.

Later still, missy g b joined the UoG as a feminist denied access to the UoG because of house rules there is no quorum to change, and so, turned journalist, she chronicles some of the developments of the UoG as well as its many failures and depredations and, living above Professor Gavin Belcher’s room in the squirrel-infested attic of the Ever-so-slightly-uglier House,¹ is able to eavesdrop on conversations between the two of them.

As ever, the concept of the UoG developed in my mind rather than on the page. Once I had written the About, drawing on fictional characters and literary personas such as Sterne’s Yorrick, Jara Cimrman, Billy Fisher and Walter Mitty, I drew back from the UoG, knowing that it would only pull me away from my writing. The UoG website became a hodgepodge of spurious out of context posts written when I was least able to concentrate on anything more meaningful, and, most often, when I was feeling seriously out of sorts. When the welsh rats (weltschmerz) descended, Gav Belcher and Professor Gavin Belcher, however, occasionally became the perfect tool to express a mordant disillusionment with the world. They could be found having impenetrable conversations on the comments pages of such websites as the Dark Mountain Project Blog. Years ago I discovered in myself the tendency to make sardonic private jokes of the sort that had others invariably reject me, think me self-evidently mad or stupid or worse while I laughed at their incomprehension. It was, of course, a defense mechanism, a reaction to what seemed the unavoidable fate of being misunderstood, condescended to and hated. At least this way I provoked it myself; I was in control. Here it was again, a sneer and a finger up at the world, and especially at the fuckers I might conceivably want to be considered a part of.

Gav Belcher and Professor Gavin Belcher, like the personas in Tony Harrison’s V, in this way began to fight amongst themselves and at other times, touching to me, come close to an understanding.

As I am cleaning toilets and serving breakfasts Professor Gavin Belcher develops new research areas and Gav Belcher is set new essay questions, projects and the like. Nothing gets written up, and what does doesn’t relate to anything much at all. There’s not much work gets done at the University of Gav. Still, like other projects before it which have gone nowhere, it has served a purpose at a difficult time. It has been with me in my mind, as have Gav Belcher and Prof Gavin “his Belchness” Belcher, and who can say they didn’t do me good.

If I had been diagnosed sooner, as I should have been, I might never have needed them. Certainly, I could have avoided the last, if not the last several, serious upheavals in my life. But there again, I wouldn’t have a bird’s mouth on a window sill in front of me, and who knows where I would be then. And so, long live Gav and Professor Gavin Belcher, long live missy g b, and long live the University of Gav!

Clatterbach

¹ That the Ever-so-slightly-uglier House is squirrel infested is not, in this instance, entirely the result of my own overactive imagination. The real life Uglier House is indeed the home of Squatter Nutkins and family. I am not sure to what extant I could not bring myself to trap and do away with the buggers having borrowed the squirrel trap of my father’s which I had always objected to, or whather it was the usual procrastination that let them get on with raising a family I certainly won’t now inconvenience, but ensconsed they are, probably the most spoiled wild rodents in North Wales.

His latest in there in front of it. A magpie trap, three foot high.

The welsh rats fall on me as soon as I sit in front of the computer. Coming back I thought on a lot of things. One of them, the way I have periodically been posting on Dark Mountain Forum – sardonic digressions and the kind of solipsistic private jokes I once had as a feature of Baz’s nihilism in an unwritten novel intended as an update of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for the postmodern age; Gav Belcher talking to Prof Gavin Belcher; me challenging the world to not understand me - and how I see in myself the preemptive aggression of somebody with attachment disorder.

I sit down and write up a round of fucks on Twitter, like I used to do when I was still on Facebook as something other than a fictional dead St Bernard. That earned me the term Weltschmertz around a year ago, from an old housemate at uni. The kind who never much tried to understand the difficulties I faced. Or in any case couldn’t. His life had been too straightforward to have a clue what might be going on in my mind.

I take a look to see if I can delete the offending posts. I can’t. Glance over them and cringe.

I delete my account on Dark Mountain’s Ning network, leaving the reason: I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member

Initially I sat down to write down a little of one strand of brainstorm that came from the journey back. From a fag break at Llangollen, or thereabouts. My head has been busy. Angry too. Chocolate and caffeine and crap on Anglesey the other day dry stone walling (yesterday in fact. Christ, so much has happened since, in my mind at least, that it feels so long ago). I had a fantastic day as it happens, and believed in something. But then more chocolate and crap walking in the Glyders straight afterwards. And my head was crammed. I wanted to document some of that.

Making up sandwich bags earlier today I was deep in a reverie of walking people down from the mountain. Two lost souls. Me with headtorch walking at night, and seeing them as they rang mountain rescue. Me talking over the phone to MR.

A lot of reveries with someone I met the other day.

Talking to the docs, of course.

I’ve been making governments, on panel shows talking about how my welsh is pretty good (it isn’t) and defending the welsh against charges of bigotted nationalism etc. I’ve been on bizarre reality shows involving going on long long walks. But it all comes and goes so fast that reconstructing it is like trying to reel off the number plates of cars you have passed on a long drive like that one just now. It’s not possible, and then, when you tell of the few prolongued reveries you can recall, it sounds reasonable and wholly ordinary. But it is all the time.

The brainstorm was setting up an internet forum for people addicted to the internal combustion engine. It came from some of the ad hominem posts on Dark Mountain’s response to George Monbiot in the Guardian. A whole philsophy panned out behind it. The Gav Belcher, Prof Belcher interplay I had down pat now. missy g b was on the scene too documenting it. I had it panned out in terms of my day today:

• Driving the ten country miles over the Llanberis pass to Pete’s Eats to eat something I knew I shouldn’t
• Chainsaw-related reveries
• loving the Harley at Pete’s and the Discovery parked at work
• Loving driving to Pete’s, and being addicted to driving everywhere in North Wales

It discussed how difficult it is to steer yourself to a life where all reliance on the motor car is obviated. It discussed allegations of hypocrisy as not being the hand down winner of arguments people think it is.

It discussed a lot of things. But it is for another time… ie. never. It was long and involved and could have been a good example, not so much of the brainstorms I was talking about in my last post – far from it – but the distractions and part of the pressure of thought in my head even when I’m well stimulated by driving, if not by radio. Besides so far here I’ve been distracted by Twitter and shite all the way and have written this much in an hour and 40 minutes. I’m knackered, have a long shitty day tomorrow and I’m made enough of an ass of myself already.

Clatterbach

I would like very much to one day learn something from the talent Priestley here shows for, to paraphrase Einstein, making everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. It is something I admire more than anything else in writing, in thought, in perhaps any form of creativity.

I came back from a spell living in Prague some five years ago unsure of what I would do with my life. I remember sitting in my brother’s flat compulsively writing notes into his computer. I had an idea. I would write a collection similar in intent, as I see now, to Priestley’s, which I had as yet neither read nor heard of, entitled Reasons to Be Cheerful.

Life had by that time become too complicated. Politics and philosophy had long before become habitual without the balance that ought to be provided by light relief, by comedy, the comforts of friendship, a hinterland. These things I strived for but often missed in the effort. Reasons to be Cheerful was to celebrate simplicity, and simple pleasures.

Somewhere, I’m sure I still have those notes that I typed out and e-mailed to myself. I would love to know what that unknown man wrote to himself and, unknowingly, to me. (I was listening, a simple pleasure, to In Our Time, a kind of Brains Trust for our time, while chipping away at my first green man with my new Swiss chisels the other day – these days I am nothing but hinterland – and the programme was on William Hazlitt, another man who hits that sweet spot described by Einstein; he once practised philosophy and felt that, since a man at one time in his life is not the same as the same man older, perhaps wiser, but different, since he is unknown to himself, self-interest is no more rational than altruism.) Perhaps the pleasures of this old self would be unrecognisable to me now. Perhaps not.

One, certainly, would be the same.

I read with interest one of Priestley’s pieces on the donnee as I will call it (a word thick with the moss of meaning for me).

“The coming of the [i]idea[i]. There is nothing piecemeal about its arrival. It comes as the ancient gods and goddesses must have manifested themselves to their more fortunate worshippers. (And indeed it comes from the same place.) At one moment it is there, taking full possession of the mind, which quivers in ecstatic surrender.”

For me this is so, but also not.

Something one moment is not there and the next is very much present. But in large part this is retrospective. Such initial impulses are many in my mind. These are the initial sparks, as if from a fire steel. The delight for me is when one takes, that spark falling right onto that thinnest, most receptive, of the peelings of dry white birch bark and, with an infinnitessimal pause which only piques the interest, buds into flame.

This maybe is not true. It may be as false a reconstruction of what happens so often in my mind as it is a Donne-ish forced metaphor. It may be that those initial impulses that come as Donnees, as “givens”, as if gifts from the gods and goddesses, are different from the very first moment they cease to be not there, and not only in infinnitesimal retrospect, that briefest moment before it ceases to be unselfconsious and begins, a humunculous, to be manhandled by the various midwives on offer. I can’t say with any certainty.

What is certain, though, is that the arrival of the idea does not stop with the moment of the donnee’s arrival. A true, glorious, moment of successful brainstorming, and delight, is in that first catching of the idea, yes, but then in the sixty seconds of distance run, the dodging of obstacles, the quick footwork, the changing of direction, and the jump to the floor that puts it down behind the line.

That, more than anything is when I am alive. That more than anything, is delight.

Doing so shoots up the priorities list once in a while, only to falter when the drain on my time of doing so seems to be so much, for something which seems so unproductive. Once again it has done so because of my upcoming consultation with a shrink who is supposed to know what he is about.

Today I was cleaning the hotel I work at, as I do most days. And, as happens on most days, an involved reverie began to unravel in my mind.

This time I was disciplining and throwing out some unruly customers. They had turned up, a group from Microsoft, demanding to be treated with some respect as befitting their status as representatives of a world-renowned business. In the evening, however, they turned up drunk and began to be noisy and exceptionally inconsiderate to other guests. This has become quite a feature in some of my reveries, with guests from office outings having to be disciplined for being inappropriate behaviour towards groups of young school girls over and over again. On this occasion it was a little different. These guys wanted to go out of their way to be boorish and to make work for myself and the others at the hotel. Most often¹ they put their fingers down their throat to throw up, intentially, over the floor. Such willful ignorance is, of course, calculated to anger me.
And so, in various iterations, I sleep over at the hotel to wtch these guys. Back to jumping off points numerous times to have bosses etc. warn me that they are likely to cause trouble. I come out, plain clothed, and in hotel uniform at different times, to watch them as they behave like this. I ask them to clean it up. This comes early on and repeats countless times. I Then ask them to leave. This comes later and repeats many times. I ask them to leave, ask them if they are sure they want to be driving, and call the local police to let them know that there may be people leaving, drink driving. This repeats numerous times. Various confrontations repeat numerous times.

All this while I am in a state of high arousal, over an entirely hypothetical anger. This is typical.

Numerous discussions with guests, imagined. Numerous discussions with staff, real. Often these relate to laughing that, yeah, those guys were not going to get away with it.

Then there is getting the other guests to sign witness statements in the morning.

The next stage was the court cases. This develops again. I am in court, in danger of being done for contempt of court for repeatedly asserting that the guys in question are ‘fuckwits’, ‘shitwits’, ‘nincomtwats’ etc. I am essentially saying that I say it as I see it. Similarly, I am saying that though the guys from Microsoft who are trying to do me for mistreatment are willing to dress up and try to come over all respectable in a court of law, I won’t dissemble or try to appear as anything other than what I am, nor speak in a way that does not come naturally for me, and that, if I was willing to call them fuckwits and pricks to their faces on the night in question, it would be dishonest to call them anything else in court. Etc. Then the usual discussions in news conferences etc afterwards.

This only gives a tiny insight into the kind of intrusive daydreams I have, but it is something. I will try to think of others that have been coming up again and again and again. There have been so many. It is really not conceivable that I could ever do more than allude to them.

Gav B

¹ Such reveries invariably repeat, or rewind to a certain point, a jumping off point, to take a different direction. Such different ‘takes’ I often call ‘iterations’, from a word I first encountered in a book on Chaos theory. Again and again, the reverie may progress in a different direction until my mind finds something to play with, and then this again may become a jumping off point. This process is very much accelerated, with these takes and iterations being explored rapidly so the story – it is usually, essentially, a story – can progress to the point that it is absolutely not going to be interrupted by events in the outside world unless they be over a high boredom threshold/level of stimulation ie. Lisa Hannigan coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel, singing happily, to ask if the water is likely to warm up any time soon.