numptie

I've been stupid: staying in situations for the wrong reasons; doing things that make me miserable, rather than doing the courageous thing and facing the truth; letting loyalty and greed dictate to me against my better judgement; letting foolish optimism blind me to grey reality.

Ahh. That was cathartic...

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Andy Corsham

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Andy Corsham

Generate your own meaning...No. 278

Rain pinging down on the metal window frame at dusk.
Too many books to read.
The veneer between desire and restraint wearing away.
The rain-sodden corpse of a shrew in the back yard.
Seeing the widespread reality of desperation in the workplace.
Being 43 on Monday week.
Grinding brazil nuts to a pulp with your molars, and sluicing the debris away with cold Burgundy.
Re-imaging the scene in Saving Private Ryan when the soldier's body -- decapitated by a 20mm shell -- falls off the decking of the Tiger tank they've just 'killed'.
Swifts screeching under the thundery clouds, sounding desperate to feed, to live.
The days shortening already.
A [noun] [verb]ing the [noun], all [adjective], [adjective], and [adjective].
[Expletive].

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Saving Private Ryan

Just finished watching this, and I'm not sure...

So much about this film is right. The first third, and the last third, which are both focussed on combat, or preparations for combat, are brilliantly realised -- technically, and in their depiction of the relentless, random, undiscriminating, revolting violence of war. As in war, no one is privileged by their status or skill. They can all die, and they do. These battle scenes are terrifying.

The central third, though, I'm not so sure about. There's too much obvious soul-searching and thinking going on, and the script, to me, feels a bit too neat and pithy. The Band of Brothers approach, with people being mostly mute or inarticulate, feels somehow truer.

The emotional truth of the film -- the veteran thinking back, and being profoundly grateful for/humbled by the sacrificial deaths of so many of his comrades -- comes across, but you're somehow overconscious of that, as if you're aware of the artifice that Spielberg is bringing to bear. In my judgement (and look how many millions I've made at the box office) the brilliant morph from Matt Damon to the veteran at the end does enough. I think the final speeches over-egg the pudding.

Very nearly great, very nearly. It makes you feel for the people who had to do this, and admire their immense courage amidst terrifying circumstances -- a civilian army, for the most part: ordinary people like my uncle and my granddad, all just doing their bit. And yet...it feels a bit too neat, narratively, and that stops it -- for me -- making the leap to greatness.

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Bloody Spielberg

He did it again. He made me cry. He did it with E.T, he did it with Always, and now he's done it with Saving Private Ryan. The sharp stab of emotion, for me, came when the army car pulls up at the house of the dead soldiers' mother and she, seeing the officer and the priest get out, and understanding why they've come, does this undignified slow collapse/sit down onto the porch. After all that's gone before -- the terrible violence and relentless slaughter -- this is a moment of great humanity. It humanises what was irretrievably brutal and awful, and makes an unbearable human connection. Bloody hell, I'm filling up again, just writing it down.

Sniff.

It actually feels good to cry.

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residual...a cute hamster

(slightly distorted, and eyeing the barbecue nervously, perhaps...)


ahh...

friday night evening light nice and warm

my friends did a great barbie/dessert combo, and we sat out til half-one talking. it was lovely

closed for renovations

This blog is closed for a while -- for positive reasons this time: I'm going to be focusing on writing that novel, and doing some different, active things rather than all this morose navel-gazing on a daily basis (which is what this has become). I think I'm much happier, and a better bloke, when I do stuff rather than talk.

Feel free to drop me an email -- andycorsham@tesco.net -- if you fancy a chat.

See you in a bit!

Andy x

Desolate

Something from my Krakow notebook, which kind of matches my mood today...

Katowice: On the train back to Krakow. Evening. Between the coal-mining/processing plants and the suburban railway station...six blokes leaning against a wall, between the railway line and yet another set of derelict industrial buildings -- all displaced bricks and jagged-glassed, metal-framed windows. The blokes with beer bottles, woolly caps, echoes of West European street/urban dress styles. Unreal MTV wardrobe. Posturing for a video that'll never be made.

I don't think I've ever seen so many decaying, part-demolished buildings in so small a space. Christ, it's depressing.

It's been raining, and the sky's still overcast. The evening is coming down prematurely because of all the cloud and dirt. Katowice isn't pretty. For the first time on this trip, the general decrepitude and run--downness makes my heart sink (rather than appearing interesting/characterful/historically revealing).

It's as if an entire industrial age is collapsing and crumbling back into the earth: brick by brick, building by building. An overwhelming atmosphere of decay. Signal boxes that look like forts in enemy territory; outposts against hordes of hoodied barbarians. Badlands. Ashy wastelands. Wild, abandoned zones of drink, drugs, gangs, rape, glue-sniffing, unremarked death.

It's getting cool now, with the sun invisible and low behind the clouds. You can feel the rain coming, see it in that flat, 'white-between-slate-grey-clouds' light. In the gloomy carriage interior, the drunks who seemed amusing earlier now seem threatening, and the empty seats look ominous rather than luxuriously spacious.

Fences, gates, locks, dogs, ashy earth. Deathly. Gloomy.

Abandoned buffers in old sidings -- the tracks long gone. Weeds where the rails used to be. Shit.

As the light faded under that cloudy sky, that sense of desolation became almost frenzied. As if I was in the grip of a strange, unbidden, panicky fear. A most peculiar feeling, like a panic attack. Every rain-soaked, ashy house yard looked like the end of someone's sad, impoverished life; and every puddled mud track curving off into the woods took on the aspect of a path to World War Two killing site.

This evening, feeling like this, and tired, and wanting to get home, and knowing what I know about history, Poland feels like a country -- and a landscape -- that has death hovering over it in the rain and the rising mist. Drear and desolate.

Ho hum. If my life was a country, at the moment it would be Poland.

Bollocks. I wonder if I might be 'clinically' depressed? I've been anhedonic for weeks.

Bad day at the office

I'm used to being good -- or even really good at what I do. Sometimes, though, a couple or three things in one day remind me that, in my current job, there's too much stuff that I'm mediocre/not very good at. I hate that: it works much better if I live in a fool's paradise and never get reminded about it. Bugger.

b e c a l m e d (2)

Some more notes from my Krakow notebook (if you can bear any more narcissistic self-examination and mixed metaphor sundaes...):

07.06.05. 08:10 -- sitting on my hotel bed after breakfast, waiting for digestion, rest and reflection to do their things and bring me to a state of energetic jump off.

I've noticed that my handwriting has settled down this morning, into something neat and measured, something more thoughtful and careful, suggesting precision, thought, accuracy, seriousness, authority. A divergence from my usual frenetic scrawl. Suggestive of calm and control, those fugitive conditions that haunt me so rarely.

This makes me think about sitting at a cafe table under a parasol, looking around me and writing down wise, insightful, witty, pithy thoughts. Seeds for short stories. Novel-founding images and character insights. The third cup of coffee arrives: you feel happy and contented despite the caffeine frazzle -- in touch with your true self. The waitress is attentive and sympathetic, and you are doing what you love to do, and it shows in your absorption, calm, and confidence. You've 'found yourself' -- talent, discipline and inspiration have folded into each other, merged, made something whole and robust. And you've got the time and energy you need.

You crumple up the old soft, pliable, thinly-sketched you and put that scrunched-up paper napkin-like self into the ashtray. The balled paper gives one last suggestion of life (it decompresses a little), then settles back into forgettable immobility. It's like an old skin that you've shed: you've scraped your way out of that outdated chrysalis, and your fully-formed self is released at last, ready to fly, and buzz, and alight, and feed, and move on -- self-sufficient, self-propelled, unafraid of what's on the other side of the next patch of undergrowth, the next thicket, the next field. So different from that soft, anxious, creeping thing that -- just yesterday -- moved slowly and repeatedly through the same rotting leaf litter on that same small patch of well-covered ground.

And the next day, towards the end of my train journey:

08.06.05. Interesting journey, especially in terms of the effect that 11-plus hours on these trains have had on my focus, looseness and creativity. ('Looseness' in the sense of being relaxed, being myself, feeling able to follow wherever my creative thoughts take me; that sense almost of being 'outside time', where you don't have any of the usual prompts of duty or of habit -- this feels like a space where my brain can do that unconstrained free-association work that's essential for my creativity, and for my belief in that creativity, and for stamina in keeping at it.) It's as if the fact of being 'captive' on a train, without options, communicates itself to your unconscious and says, "go on then -- here's your opportunity, get stuck in." And doing so gets you into that 'flow state' where one association/image feeds the next, and sets up a pattern/dynamic where they start to come thick and fast, freely and richly, and where you stop doing that 'conscious policing' thing...your thoughts outstrip the censor and just break through however they like.

The lesson here is to create the space where this can happen: forgetting about the time- and space-provision necessities of writing/creativity has helped me become stagnant/arid/boring/A. N. Other metaphor for uncreative and dull.

And another thing (with the warm evening sunlight flickering through the trackside trees and onto the faces of the passengers, on the seat shoulders, on the sheened edges of the luggage racks...) -- er, another thing: this session of thinking and creating has really lifted my mood; I feel completely different from how I did first thing this morning, and all because of this amazing thing I've been doing with my pen, hand, wrist, arm, and brain. How cool is that?

I'm going on about this so much because I'm trying to drum these lessons into my brain: transcribing these notes is part of my project of retraining myself to write daily, to do it for the sake of it, for the simple enjoyment of it, to find that place where your fingers move over the keyboard almost without you thinking about it, your fingertips microseconds ahead of your conscious mind. The dart and flow of creativity, emerging almost on its own. Even if you're churning out turgid crap that no-one else wants to read, the act of writing is pleasure enough in itself when it comes like this.

b e c a l m e d (1)

I wonder if everyone who has the luxury of self-examination sometimes feels like this? Like they've just woken up from a dream of their own life, where they've been occupying their body's space, but not truly living? As if they're just drifting, a boat with no engine, driven whichever way the tide and swells take them. Powerless and hollowed out.

I was looking back at the notebook I took away with me on holiday to Poland and Germany, and which somebody has been writing in -- maybe me, maybe some fictional character. It doesn't start off very well:

05.06.05. Been feeling a bit anhedonic of late: only alcohol, bad food and the intensity of heart to hearts have taken the edge off that fuzzy anonymity/invisibility, so I've been doing too much booze and fat, and not enjoying life very much. The resultant weight gain has locked me into a tightening spiral of excess, self-disgust, powerlessness, and circle-completing comfort eating/drinking. Not been doing anything creative: Blog stalled. Novel dead.

That's the background for this Krakow trip, which I booked on a whim one lager-fuelled Friday evening in April. I had it slated as a 'research' trip for my novel ("Broken"), a project that I subsequently threw aside in disgust. Stripped of that incentive, I've been feeling ambivalent about the trip, and a bit anxious and nervous about this strange, unknown place.

So. Moody, anxious, anhedonic. No shape to, or pleasure in, my life. Overweight, self-conscious, defeated, miserable, full of self-loathing. The perfect preparation for a holiday, eh?

My trip did get better, though. Strangely, it got better when I was on the train to Germany to see my relatives, trapped inside a metal tube for twelve hours. First, I was reading some poems from Seamus Heaney's big, fat Opened Ground collection, and some of these poems were really speaking clearly to me:

08.05.05. Part of a stanza from "Markings":

All these things entered you
As if they were both the door and what came through it.
They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

There's something here [although you really need the stuff that precedes it as well...] that means I'm almost feeling the meaning rather than understanding it. These are lines that sneak up on you, say something deep and mysterious, and leave you with a newly-opened space to explore. And yet, as soon as you start trying articulate the meaning that's spoken to you, your words start to drift away from you, or else they pile up on each other, too eager to try and explain what they can't quite grasp -- before the meaning gets away from you.

In the lines before this stanza, Heaney writes about a child's evening football game, the adult's ground markings for a building or ploughing -- images of explicitness and implicitness have been wound together, the concrete and the imagined. I guess this creates a kind of diffuse space in your mind, where the tangible and the liminal coexist, and speak to each other in whispers. This is a space almost beyond words, a 'felt' space that we reach through some unconscious emotional channel. What seems to happen here -- for me at least -- is that the line about "the door and what came through it" does precisely that 'time fixing' thing inside the poem. For a moment, you're on the brink of that wordless space, feeling the poem's images shiver and merge in your mind, feeling the emotional connections, and being 'primed' to feel the strangeness of that door opening.

It's as if life's fleetingness, these momentary clarities and experiences, are held there for a moment in the poetry -- close to conscious understanding, but always provisional -- before they dissolve back into what's lost. And I guess that's the space we live in all the time -- suspended in the concrete now between the dissolution of the past and the haze of the future.

I wonder if there's something here, too, about living in the moment? ie that being here -- and being here, present is partly a function of registering the limitations of not living in the now: that all the energy you spend reanalysing the past or angsting about the future is wasted energy -- nothing's bringing back (or changing) the past, and only action will make the future different. The desire to move through time like a wave...to be a volume of water and feel the wave move through you...some metaphor like that is what I'm stretching for here...

So...all that waffle told me what? Well, that, I don't spend enough examining the world of now. That I drift through my life like a ghost most of the time, hardly noticing where I am, often thinking about being somewhere else, doing something else, instead of making the most of the moment, and taking my chances in doing something different, and taking control of things. How that solipsistic reanalysis of the past is a barrier to action. And, especially, how little time I spend doing the things that I really love doing: reading, writing, thinking: engaging with the world and trying to constantly see it anew, and fresh, and to make sense of things.

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Terrific Book

I heartily commend Dirt Music by Tim Winton.

When I finished reading it, sitting on a bench under some trees on a sunny morning in Krakow, I wrote the following in my notebook:

...a tremendously well-written, gripping and emotionally engaging novel, full of feeling, colour, [poetic description], memory and emotional power. At the end [details omitted so as not to spoil things], it makes you want to cry. A fine book. It feels like one that will resonate, like Cat's Eye

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Poland

I haven't been posting exactly 'regularly' lately, I know.

Next week will be post-free (unless I send summat compelling from my phone, or chance upon a cyber-cafe): I'm off to Krakow/Auschwitz/Germany-by-train for a week.

Have a great week, why don't you?

A x

---

Der Untergang

I went to see Downfall the other evening -- the recent German film about the final days of Hitler and his inner circle in his Berlin bunker in 1945.

It's a pretty extraordinary film. If you have even the slightest interest in history, I really recommend that you go see it. I don't have a coherent view on it as yet (I think I need to go and see it again soon), but I do have some random thoughts...

It's two and a half hours long; it has two main sets -- the dimly-lit subterranean bunker complex, and artillery-ravaged Berlin; its subject matter is unremittingly bleak; and yet, despite all that, it never drags -- the time flew by. To make that happen, the director has to be doing something special.

It's gripping and dark: there's a sense of foreboding, and of inevitability, and you get caught up in the strange logic of the frenzied atmosphere, where suicide and self-immolation seems the only rational choice. The shells rumble and crash, the walls and ceilings shake, dust falls, lights flicker, the tension and the claustrophobia build.

There's a cast of the famous and the not-so-famous: Hitler, Eva Braun, Himmler, Speer, Bormann -- the Hitler circle; the military high command -- Keitel, Jodl et al; and the 'lesser' figures -- Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, various SS/Wehrmacht officers and men. What's both interesting and disturbing is the way that you get drawn into this world, and how you feel yourself engaging with these people as human beings, and sympathising/empathising with them. Given the repulsiveness of the Nazi ideology and its horrendous results, there's a bit of you that's resistant to this identification/empathy -- it seems like a betrayal. There's been controversy about the 'humanisation' of Hitler, and I guess that criticism could be extended more broadly across the rest of the characters -- you find yourself differentiating them into 'decent', 'good/bad' and so on, and then you pull yourself up, remembering that they're all part of this inner circle, serving this monstrous man and ideology. But I think that's part of the richness of this film -- to make you look beyond the more 'comfortable' conception of alien monstrousness and see, instead, the reality of differentiation between people, all bound somehow to the same twisted, malevolent belief system. It feels like a truer reflection of messy reality to me.

Another criticism I've heard is that the film is somehow an apologia for the German people's part in the Nazi past -- the argument here seems to be that, by showing Hitler's tirades against the 'failed' German 'race', the film-maker is implicitly portraying the German people as 'victims' of Hitler, and thereby excusing/diluting their complicity in the Third Reich's dark history. And yet, in the film, there's an explicit rejection of this: Goebbels is given a speech that cites the responsibility of the people who -- in large numbers -- voted for Hitler and the Nazis in the 1933 elections; the essence of this speech is "this is what they chose". Given that, I find it hard to understand the criticism.

Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, tops and tails the film with brief interview excerpts, filmed when she was in her 80s (by my guess). In these segments, she reveals a (fairly typical, I think) disconnect between her own experience and the wider effects of Nazism -- as if she couldn't see that she was somehow implicated, or couldn't bring herself to make the connection. I think this echoes what Gitta Sereny wrote about Albert Speer.

Anyway, go and see it and make your own mind up. It's a pretty extraordinary experience.