A MAD AMERICAN
I hope this stuff does not piss you all off. I am a nutter, but not in an inetersting way - just a boring, run of the mill nutter, scared to be alive and scared to be dead.
At times I have to put this stuff down on paper - not because I want to be a ‘writer’, but because it is therapy to be as honest as possible, even to myself if no one is listening.
One of my fantasies is to live in a world where we can all be completely honest with each other with goodwill.
A schoolmate from India who was a wit made this epigram up when he found out I was studying Latin. He asked me to conjugate a verb, so I said, "Amo, Amas Amat...". He said, "Oh, I see, Amo, Amas, A Mad, American,..."
I was eighteen, and 'little did I know' how prophetic his words would be.
By the age of 26 I had had two nervous breakdowns, one quite radical. I acted out being down and out, and wore the same clothes day and night for weeks, and wandered London feeling lower than the lowest beggar. I had an out of body experience when my spirit , in an evil state of envy, was floating out of my room to hurt someone very close to me, and the threshold of the doorway suddenly became the abyss sucking my spirit, and I knew I had to get back to my sleeping body which I could see on the bed, or die. The force of Good can be very frightening. Imagination? Huh! WTFK.
In those days, some Freudians and others attributed many neuroses and psychoses to the person living in denial of their latent homosexuality. A mentor I trusted had suggested to me that I might be latent - I was sensitive, etc.
It meant nothing at the time, but when I felt a failure at university - and guilty because I saw so many working class people my age who were brighter than me and should be where I was - I felt that my ambition to become a great scholar/intellectual and to find a woman to marry and have children with was impossible, I thought my failure of will and confidence was possibly a symptom of a latent homosexuality. In order to be honest, to be living in 'good faith', I tried to become homosexual at least in my imagination. It was very painful, and I did not succeed in having homosexual desires, which made me feel worse, as I thought I was in denial, living inauthentically. Forbidden, because it was 'inauthentic', from feeling attraction to women, which I did feel, and unable to be attracted to men, I was doomed to a pathetic limbo existence, a latent homosexual who could not be himself, and just be a failure either as a real man or as a queer. So one day, in a graveyard in Saffron Walden, I read on a tombstone the verse from the psalm used in the Anglican Common Prayer, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." I had no idea to what that referred, but to me it meant that I had to break my stiff spine of pride about who I was - it didn't matter who I was or what I was, so long as I| did the right thing by other people. I could feel my spine crack. So at that point I wanted to act for the oppressed, and that meant acting on my Christian socialism - working for a charity maybe. I eventually joined the poverty action group called The Haslemere Group - mainly charity workers who in their spare time wanted to do more than just 'professional charity', which they saw as cosmetic.
I wrote short 'verses' that didn't scan, and rarely rhymed with reason, drew drawings, etc to express my 'existential angst' and neurotic craziness (not actually insane, you know, but not normal neither).
But fast forward to 2023, when I had a small epiphany in a pub,in Marchmont Street, on a quiet night that showed me that ordinary people could be beautiful.
MAY 11, 2023
In the pub in Marchmont Street (The Lord John Russell). Irish bar tender, and cockney bar girl who is traditional to the core - laughing and joking in a deep voice. Tipsy on a pint of porter. I felt better than I have felt for so long - I felt back home. Suddenly everyone in the pub was beautiful.
I want to sing of these things
I see and feel.
Of my pain for my most beloved son, Tobias Felix.
Toby the fortunate and happy one.
He was so cheerful when he was born, so we called him 'Felix'.
And
Of the beauty of other people - ordinary people -
Who shine
As if touched by angels.
In 1975 I moved into a shared flat with my good friend and comrade, J. He was in his first year at the London Films School, (International), and I got in in 1976. Film school was bliss. We were nearly a true community - working together on projects of some consequence that also could express our ab-normal feelings in artistic form, so as to make them not just neurotic ramblings. But also spending most of our time with each other outside work as well. No longer did I feel alienated, abnormal, crazy, etc. And we all had a 'mission' in life, to make films of some consequence. We were the shamans, the bards of our society.
But mea culpa, my oddness persisted.
So more 'poems' and 'songs'.
Last Night I dreamt I was Dying
Writing on the wind
The longer I write
The more I forget.
Last night I dreamt I was dying
And my mother said goodbye
But she couldn't hear me
When I tried to tell her the same
Last night I dreamt I was dying
And my friend Pete
Walked by, and said Hi -
But I couldn't make him stop, he couldn't see me
What a helluva way to die.
Last night I was in a fever
And my friend Joe
Said - "Don't worry Moe
You didn't make it,
But you tried on your day off.
Dying's no big thing."
Last night my Dad coughed
Blood and snot
And I remembered
But I hope he forgot
How his legs had been strong
And his brain quick
And he made things happen.
Last night I dreamt I was dying
And the guy next door
Banged on my door
"Hey kid, you left your bike
Outdoor
And even though they can't ride
The poor little kids will steal it real quick."
I couldn't get up
He wouldn't shut up
Oh Lord, what a helluva way to die.
Last night I dreamt
I was eaten alive
By a bug in my ear.
I turned this way and that
But that bug kept on eating
Left side or right side
He kept right on feeding
And I thought or imagined
That he smiled with a terrible smile,
And a desperate leer.
Last night the sandman came
With cut glass in his hands
With cut glass in his hands
To put in my eyes
Instead of sleep's sweet sands
I dreamt I couldn't see
For the pain in my eyes
Oh Lord, what a helluva way to die.
Last night my sister came into my room
She came into my room
With blood on her hands
With blood on her hands
She came into my room.
"Sister, oh sister, what have you done?
Sister, oh sister, whose blood is that
Whose blood on your hands?"
"Mine or yours, oh brother of mine,
Mine or yours, oh brother of mine.
For didn't Dad once say,
'Blood is thicker than whiskey,
And a bottle a day
Keeps the bogeyman away?"
"Sister, what have you done?"
"I have opened my body
O brother,
I have opened my body to
You and the others,
You love our cat more than ever,
You can ever love me
So here is my blood
And here is my body,
And let the devil take the rest -
Let the devil take the rest."
Last night I dreamt
The ox was green
And the grass was red,
And the sun shone darkly
And the dogs had a bed
And the eyes of men had no bodies
And the teeth of women
Chewed dead fingers
Anxiously
If I could cry tears
Like the skies rain,
And get rid of fears
And thoughts of pain
If I could find the peace
That I imagine ancient fathers had
And leave these places that confuse me so.
She was all dark
And her proud hair
Shone black in my sight
O beautiful light
In my night, oh
Beautiful light
She was my light
And her hair shone
So black, so black,
She held my life
Like gentle rain
Like gentle rain
She held my life
Her hair a knife
To my neck
To my neck a knife
My Friend L. match made me with J. in 1967. I was by then just clear of my breakdown, and I had decided not to worry about who I was, but just to do the best I could do for the 'world'. I was on a 'mission'. I joined a group called The Haslemere Group to campaign for Third World peoples' rights, and to uncover the insanity at the heart of our civilisation. J. was medical student but a prodigy, she went to university at 16, and was cynical about the intellectual mediocrity of the whole profession, and very condescending about its epistemological foundation. I wrote many pages of 'poems' etc to J..
Here's one. I wrote this in Calais after seeing R. off to US to visit my brother G. J. was in America on a camping trip with another junior doctor, and though it was still uncertain, it was likely she was starting to say goodbye to me. R. had helped me survive the pain for a month.
Re-reading it makes me cringe, but, what the fuck.
I have stood by the walls of Mycenae
The cruel kings beneath my feet
Hoping by the magic glimmering of beaten gold
To escape death’s hug in this hillside of rock.
I have watched across the Aegean the nimble-limbed
Slap the backs of great bulls as they turned in the air
In the Cretan sun.
The dolphins carry Ulysses and Theseus
Through these waves,
I have watched.
But I am here now, and those days pile up in a
frightening heap
A mass grave of the past, tumbling bodies of days
emaciated beyond belief
Into the rectangle carved out of the chalky earth,
I am here now, and you are the only Crete
And you only vivify these Cretan Kings
Hugging themselves in their narrow shafts of gold.
In December 2010, I started to question reality itself, our reality - where teeth revealed could either be a smile of friendship, love and joy, or a snarl before an attack, or the prelude to ripping apart another life to eat them, sometimes still alive.
And then Toby jumped off London Bridge 9 months later.
Poems Oct 2010 to...December 2010
The smell of bacon in the air.
The smell of bacon in the air
Is like the beauty of a woman -
All that is good
And right -
Is like the careful
Love of parents and brothers and sisters -
All that is good and right -
Like the scent of flowers
In the night air -
All that is gently
Secret, but also there
To the careful touch
Of the wandering youth
Beneath a tender moon
Of 'cloudless climes and starry skies'.
Bacon, bacon, bacon! The smell of bacon! -
A beacon for the homeless
Wanderer and the troubled
Traveller
A haven of wholesome
Pleasure and hearty welcome
To the weary worker
In open-plan
Offices
'Measureless to man'!
“I'll have a bacon sarnie
me old china!”
And the eager go-fer
Speeds on the wings
Of a humble Hermes
To the local caff
With his delicate, precise
Orders of tea with two
Sugars, cheese rolls,
And bacon sarnies
To soothe the savage
Breast on the factory floor.
“Watcher, y'all right
Mate? Wot can I do you for
Today?”
And the 'family',
Seemingly lost on the way
To work
Is resurrected in a
Workers' caff
Where tea, toast and bacon
Sarnies are served
The whole day long.
We tear the flesh of beautiful
Friendly pigs
With our incisors, our
Fangs, our grinding teeth -
How fearful is the pleasure
We take in bacon!
How dreadful our eager ripping,
Sawing, rending
Burning of this loving beast,
This four-legged brother
Who once and always trusted
Us until
The Butcher's knife
Took his life!
'My heart aches' to think
Of those eyes
'That last I saw'
In trusting love
Looking at me! -
Before the Butcher's glove
Grasped the trusting beast
To satisfy our treacherous love
Of a crispy bacon
BLT!
Helge going Berserk in 1975
Helge, our Norwegian
Work-comrade -
Fragile, sensitive
Full of unquenchable
Anger
In his leather, flared
Cowboy trousers, never cleaned,
Going Berserk in the
London Contemporary Dance Theatre
Workshop where
Resided
The fearful circular saw.
Helge, full of angst!
Helge, writing endless
Cut-ups a la William Burroughs!
(“D'yuu noo de wirk of William Burroughs” were nearly the first words he said to me).
Helge, threatening a
Parent who hit
Their child in the street,
In his lilting, half comic
Half tearful accents:
“If yu-uu hi-it dat child again,
I wi-ill hi-it yu-uu!”
Raising his fist in white,
Explosive rage, ready to strike at the least sign of opposition.
He would! - Mad glint in his white eyes!
He had been a
Bank manager
And a soldier – an officer -
But here, he was a self-made artist/victim,
Crying like Munch's Screaming Man
Against the Cruelty and Injustice of the
Universe.
He hung out with RD Laing's crew in North London,
At the Philadelphia Association, making love to
Beautiful Existential Psychotherapists -
But his heart was not in it, he said, when he told us of his
Amorous adventures, or rather, his 'existence' was not there with the other person, because he could not break out, escape, be free of the limits of his reality, his knowledge of reality – making love only emphasised the cage, did not open it!
In the London Contemporary Dance Theatre Workshop ,
(Where we hippie stage hands and prop makers made stage props and sets and whatever else was needed to stage those weird but popular dance-dramas about madness, death and love, torture and bliss)
In the basement workshop, where now is a smart cafe,
Helge says to me, wails, cries, weeps like an Israelite by the Rivers of Babylon,
“Why can not the tiger live without killing the lamb and the sheep?
Why, Why, Why?
I can not take it!!”
His strength multiplies
With his Passion!:
He picks up a 4 foot by
8 foot sheet of
Thick marine ply –
Half a hundred weight,
At least! - and heaves it
Across the whole workshop,
Crashing into a wall 10 feet from him!
“I am so an-gree!
I want to burst
Open but I can't!”
He grasps the metal
Mound of the powerful, electric circular saw,
An ugly altar of modern work
Weighing at least a ton,
Lifts one side, and
Tips it over
completely!
“Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!”
He yells.
And yet,
All in a day with
Helge – full of
Surprise, wonder,
Pain, frustration,
Comedy, tragedy -
But he was not
A drama queen.
A Rogue Victim
Out of control -
I miss those days!
After Toby killed himself, many people were like angels to us - deeply and wisely kind. And for the only time in my lfe, I was honest with all my friends about all my feelings. During this time of horror - K would say to me so often that it was like being inside a horror film you could not escape - I had a dream about a person who was part of my affinal family. He is a picture restorer of some eminence and great skill, a person of great kindness and courtesy. So I wrote to tell him of this dream - a thing I would never do in ordinary life. But life was not ordinary then.
Dear ,
I don't know whether I will send this to you. If I do send it I hope it will not offend you. But it is something that I feel I need to write.
I dreamt a dream recently that referred to your work indirectly, and I think that this refers to deeper feelings I have had for you and your family. I have always felt fortunate to have you and as part of my family.
The dream was about a mystery of some kind, a kind of philosophical mystery. It could be solved by analysing an abstract painting that had a small dark spot in the middle of it that seemed mobile, it could move slightly. And it was also like an absence. To analyse the painting a technique had to be used that included some of the methods of restoration work. In a sense, restoring the painting would solve the mystery.
The mystery also seemed to include at its edges something to do with Toby, as if solving the mystery would help Toby in some way. Maybe not bring him back to life, but somehow help him. A friend of mine and his wife subscribe to some mystical beliefs, and they prayed for Toby to go through the 'bardo' well after he had died. Others who are Christian have prayed for his soul.
As it is with many dreams, seemingly trivial things felt as if they were of deep importance and significance.
As I woke up slowly, many things flashed through my mind. The careful way you work with such precious and fragile works of art. The way that I have always admired the stable and well-ordered and calm life that you and ..... have created for you and your children. Every time I used to go through Clapham Junction on the train I would imagine you and your family going about their business and lives, almost creating a separate, aesthetically valid, world for yourselves to live in, and I admired this and it gave me comfort.
Restoring beautiful and intricate works of art seemed to me to require a particular type of detection-work, combining the practice of painting, and the type of thinking required to solve a puzzle.
And so it is with us now with the absence of Toby. This is a mystery that could be seen by others as a small, dark spot in the middle of a plethora of colours and shapes that themselves now make little representational sense: the physical sensational world now no longer makes any sense to us, and Toby's absence, though to others only a small part of this world, is infinitely large to us, and his absence makes the rest of the world meaningless. A' black hole', something very small and yet infinitely large at the same time, sucking all of the universe into it. Toby's absence is a black hole in our universe.
For me, I feel sometimes that what Toby did was, in part of his mind, for all of us. He had been interested in Jung's idea of a Jesus figure or archetype that all of us had in our collective unconscious. Someone who sacrificed himself for the good of others. And was reborn, and went to heaven. This maybe explains the determination and calm on his face as he jumped into the River Thames, reported to us by the young woman who witnessed his dying moments. The secret fears he had of letting people down, of worrying that his earlier girlfriend had committed suicide because he had broken it off with her, and that another young woamn might be similarly hurt by his rejection of her, his despair of the world ever turning out right, and his despair that he could ever do the things that he felt he was gifted to do, his own fears of growing ill or feeble and having to be looked after. Maybe also an unconscious sense in which his parents needed a shock to take them out of their ruts by a mystical act of sacrifice that would lead to his rebirth and theirs.
But his beautiful mind had also gone in those last hours. Every day I seem to need to imagine jumping in the river with Toby. As if he was leading the way for us to conquer our own fears of death, as if to say, perhaps unconsciously,"See, it is not so bad. If I can conquer death, so can you. Do not worry. Life and death are good."
Once, I think, some years ago, Toby said to Luke that it was all ok, talking of the sun as Sol Invictus (the unconquered sun), a Roman idea that has been taken up by some esoteric schools in Europe I believe.
My brother and I once collaborated on a dance drama that used TS Eliot's phrase, "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many..." We did not know much about the source of this in Dante, when we used it, but Toby did, and he knew that Eliot would have been comparing modern people who work in the City of London in commercial jobs to Dante's souls of the dead in the vestibule of Hell who had led meaningless lives of cowardice and convention, neither saints not sinners. Toby was much concerned with the way in which so much of his so-called heritage work was a sell-out to money-making rather than a celebration of culture and beauty. He was also disillusioned with the petty-minded careerism in the universities he studied in, rather than a truly scholarly search for ultimate truths.
That he should join the crowds going over London Bridge, and then do an act of extreme courage among them... I do not know.
I said to my younger brother George (who has very bad cancer of the liver) that may be Toby did do this for us, but that he did not know that this was the wrong way to do it. And George said,"Maybe it wasn't the wrong thing for Toby, maybe it was the right thing for him." I had never thought of that so bluntly.
When we thought Toby was missing, your offer to help us meant a huge amount to me. I felt also at Toby's funeral a huge amount of very strong sympathy coming from you and your wife.
Although I have always known that I have certain weaknesses, Toby's death has shown me weaknesses that I never suspected. I thought I had managed to accept fairly well the fact that Toby and Luke would leave the nest soon, and were doing so already. They both seemed to be their own men, adults on my level, though so much more intelligent and talented. But Toby's sudden absence has made me sometimes feel like a helpless child who wants to cry out for Mummy and Daddy to come and make it all better.
It is as if our bodies just keep on living and doing what needs to be done, while my mind tells me I cannot go on, cannot cope, cannot be in this world without Toby being here as well.
Tempus fugit, in 100 years we will all be pushing up daisies, but how do I survive the interim period of maybe as much as twenty years?
Toby said several times over the last few years that the only thing that made sense of life was loving other people. This modern world did not have enough love for him that he was able to grab hold of quickly enough. His last poems that we discovered in his things were about how the modern world was false, and that the only thing to do was to try to be honest and genuine.
This is enough.
I am not sure why I wanted to say these things to you. Maybe it is because Toby has shown me that I need to talk honestly with people who are important to me before I die.
I hope this has not offended,
My best wishes,
Moe