Psychoanalysis, a slight return

To Exhibition Road on a Friday afternoon, in mid-October.

I was invited so I went — to a preview of a show at the Science Museum. Entitled Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious In Everyday Life, it is small, tenderly curated and intelligent.

It’s just off the main entrance, up a flight of steps. The light is low — giving a sense of the couch and the consulting room. A fine and private place.

The show’s title gives little indication of the contents or approach, though. It is, in fact, a collection of objects which exemplify and dramatise psychoanalytic thought and concepts. So there is stuff from Freud’s room — predictable in essence but given depth by the accompanying exploration of their significance by psychoanalyst David Bell.

An interruption to myself. David Bell is a funny little person, with a beard which perhaps contains a nest or two. He once nearly ran me over, on his bike, as he emerged, inattentively, from cycling through Waterlow Park. He certainly, absent-mindedly, didn’t see me. He always, always, always wears a sleeveless sweater, whatever the weather — which, of course, makes him look like an overgrown schoolboy from the 1950s. Which, I suppose . . .

Anyway, he was scurrying around the show at the preview, explaining things and herding people the way he does. He is also a wonderful speaker, a true believer whose views of psychoanalysis — as the central organising subject of human thought, effectively — are made acceptable — if not true or entirely believable — by his wit and eloquence. Though not charm. I doubt if anyone has ever accused him of that.

Other stuff in the show includes toys — as used to analyse children, by Margaret Lowenfeld and Betty Joseph. Basic idea: children aren’t capable of talking coherently about their inner life — ie via free association — so analyst gets them to play with toys and then analyse the deeper meaning of their play.

There are also drawings made by Melanie Klein’s young boy patient Richard. Pictures of Spitfires and Messerschmidts shooting and burning — it was war time. There are Winnicott’s squiggle pictures. Basic idea: analyst draws squiggly line on paper, child extends it, analyst explains meaning of child’s squiggle. (Put like that, it can sound daft. But I’m not sure it is. In fact, I’m sure it’s not. If we can’t find meaning and emotion in the shape and rhythm of a line, we would never visit art galleries and Picasso would have been out of work straight away.)

And there art works. One is directly sexual. Of course it is. It’s by Tim Noble and Sue Webster — YBAs, famous for their rubbish pieces (description, not judgment). There is an electronic piece. Of course, there is. It’s Arnold Dreyblatt’s The Wunderblock — a tablet screen which displays a paper of Freud’s which compared the way memory works to the child’s toy known, in German, as a Wunderblock. In English, a mystic writing pad — you write on it, you see what you’ve written, you lift the wax sheet you’ve written and it’s all gone. On Dreyblatt’s the text is electronic, speeding and drifting past, constantly rearranging and re-emphasising itself. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing in the show which isn’t well described or explained.

There is also a gorgeous Grayson Perry pot — his wife is, of course, an analytically inclined therapist. There is a ‘Cabinet of wish fulfilment’ — votives and pieces of tattooed skin from the Science Museum’s own collection. (You can imagine the justifying explanation by the curator who collected them, can’t you. Come on, he or she would have said, there’s bound to be a show someday when we’ll need a few ancient small carved penises and hands. Trust me, there will.)

What’s most intriguing about the show, I guess, is its concreteness. Psychoanalysis is the most cerebral — or, perhaps, most mental — of disciplines. It’s about words — silences and gesture, too, but mostly words. This show gives it, I suppose, body.

And, having spent an intrigued and distracted hour at the show, I wandered up towards Hyde Park for the next of the day’s distractions.

But that’ll have to wait for the next posting. Tomorrow. Probably.

Murray Sayle

January 1,1926 to September 18, 2010

Aw fuck it. More death. Another friend.

Like most people, I read about the great Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s death on the obituaries pages. I knew he was ill, of course. He had Parkinson’s. His wife Jenny had let me know and told me he was no longer at home but a little way away, in a nursing home.

Even the giants stumble and fall.

We worked together in the 1990s, when I commissioned and edited him for Night & Day, a Sunday supplement for the Mail on Sunday which was intended as an upmarket alternative to YOU Magazine — which, in going downmarket, had lost its lucrative, uptown advertisers.

I think Phillip Knightley* introduced him to us. Or rather us to him. We paid well — very well. And smart, fast, elegant and entertaining magazine writers are always much harder to find than all but those who’ve had to find them realise. I spent my days (and nights) making pig’s ears into, well . . . something better than dog’s dinners. (A good deal of editing time is spent unravelling and mercy-killing bad writers’ cliches and incomprehensible, mixed analogies.)

Murray was — with Phillip — one of the best. Although I knew the name and work, I didn’t know the breadth and range of his interests, life and appetites. He was a delight to work with. I loved his enthusiasm — not just for his own stories but for other people’s, too, and for technology. He was the first person I knew with a portable hard drive. On visits to the office, he’d plug it into a spare computer in the subs’ room and away he’d go, working his copy over and over. The subs considered and treated him like some kind of eccentric uncle. For me, he was one of those substitute fathers you pick up along the way — someone you can learn new stuff from.

I can’t remember all the stories he did for us but I remember a piece about female priests and several book reviews which weren’t really reviews but wonderful, brief essays.

In particular, I recall working with him on a shortened version of his New Yorker piece about the atom bombing of Japan. The original was, according to The Australian, his ‘greatest piece of sustained reporting’. Like all his work, it was full of odd but resonant details. I learned so much from him. He turned journalism into something approaching a sensory experience.

And I remember our lunches, of course. Not particularly alcoholic by Fleet St standards but certainly long. Murray liked to talk. God did Murray like to talk. Theories, observations, anecdotes, thoughts, gags spieled out of him. No quiet mouse myself, I think I may have contributed the odd question.

Gradually, through his spieling, I found out more about him. About his early years, working on a Murdoch paper. He was assigned to looking after the young Rupert when he first arrived in the office — or maybe that was Phillip Knightley’s job. I met his wife, Jenny — and spoke to her a lot on the phone when Murray was out and about somewhere.

I learned about his years in Japan. I’d been there, on a job, a few years earlier and had been told to look him up as he was the one who would make sense of it for me. I didn’t — too unconfident, I guess. I should have. Always generous with his opinions, he gave me answers to all the questions I’d had in my head ever since my visit.

Why, for example, do the concierges at Japanese hotels persist in giving you directions to places when they clearly have no idea where they are? A simple matter of face, explained Murray. That was the answer to a lot of my questions — though his answers were longer, far more detailed and always entertaining.

I learned about the wonderful documentaries he made with the photographer Elliot Erwitt — I’ve still got the wobble-colour VHS copies he made for me somewhere. I heard about his famous expenses claim, for a piece of sailing equipment — ‘money for old rope’.

I didn’t learn, though, that he’d also climbed Everest, crossed the Atlantic single-handed, unearthed Philby in Moscow and found Che Guevara in the jungle, like some modern day Stanley.

When I left the magazine, we kept in touch, via email, card and even the occasional phone call. He came over to give evidence at the Bloody Sunday enquiry. He’d written a report about it for the Sunday Times, claiming it was a deliberate assault by the British army. It was spiked and he resigned from the paper. You can find the piece and his later reflections on it for the London Review of Books. It’s worth reading — as is everything he ever wrote. (Though I’m not as keen as others on his Fleet St novel, The Crooked Sixpence. He told me it wasn’t very good and I think he was being as honest as ever.)

Annually, for the Chinese (Japanese?) New Year, a special Murray postcard would arrive. The format was always the same but it was a wonderful format. There would be Murray and his family — who, judging by their expressions, were actually fond of their father — posed, artlessly, in front of some object or place that he’d chosen to represent that year. If I remember right, for the year of the rat, the Japanese family Sayle shared the frame with Mickey Mouse. For the year of the cock, they were sat in front of a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I looked forward to them and wished I could think of something similarly witty to send in return. I kept them all — though I can’t put my hand to any of them right now. Then one year, the card didn’t come. I guessed, correctly, that he was ill. Then he was dead. I’m not the only one that will miss him.

* Phillip and Murray went way back. They were at school together, I think, in Sydney. Murray came to London first and when Phillip followed, he got him a job. They worked together at the Sunday Times. Phillip’s wife, though, was not so keen on Murray and the way he dominated any conversation. He was barred from their house. I think someone told me that Murray was the model for ‘the great bore of far-eastern journalism’ in John LeCarre’s Honourable Schoolboy. It might have been Phillip.

What other people did on their holidays . . .






Meanwhile . . . Get your washboards out

What I did on my holidays . . .

Sennen

Porthmeor

Porthcurno

Long Rock

Next What other people did on their holidays . . .

Meanwhile . . . Shakin' all over New Zealand

Barrie Briscoe
May 31, 1936 to August 23, 2010

To a funeral on a Cornish hillside in late summer sun with the smell of the sea, the rustle of leaf-heavy trees and the distant roar of the A30. It was for Barrie Briscoe, a nature-loving atheist who'd outrun his three score and ten and who'd lived at least four lives - roustabout, academic, architect, painter.

I didn't know him well. He was the head of the architectural practice which worked on a project with me. I don't know if he even liked the end result of the project. But I enjoyed his company the few times we met. And I think he felt the same. I like to think he did anyway.

I knew he’d been ill, very ill, of cancer. The last time I’d seen him he was in a bad way and that was last year. Then, I know, things had got worse. Yet his death still came as a shock. It always does, it seems.

I learned by email. I was away from home so I'd taken my laptop to the pub for its free and fast wi-fi. There, in my googlemail, was a message with his name in the subject field. It was from his wife, Petra - who I knew far better, through the project. 'I am sorry to tell you that Barrie died,' it began. Direct, clear and forthright. A language of friendship.

The funeral was in a vast, private garden just to the west of the Penzance that’s opened to the public now and again. I guess its owner was a friend of Barrie’s. The invitation was a flyer, with a picture of him at the top. Glass in left hand, held by the stem, right hand in a semi-fist, the point-making gesture of a lifelong teacher. He’s smiling. His eyes are twinkling. Usually that’s a lazy cliché but Barrie’s eyes really did twinkle.

‘No religious rite or cleric,’ said the invite. The ceremony was led by a friend, Richard Vanhinsbergh — I didn’t know Richard but his close personal knowledge of Barrie gave the affair a gut-felt pungency.

Bernie — who I do know, he was the builder on our project — was there, too. He dug the grave. I’ve carried, a coffin — my aunt’s, across rainy, muddy, flat, wintry Catholic ground north of Liverpool. That felt, well, primeval. What Bernie did, that felt even older.

The funeral crowd — a big one, a hundred or so — gathered on the top of a hill. There was fizzy wine to drink and fishy snacks to eat. A gathering of Penwith's great and, well not good perhaps, but good-intentioned at least — in the early evening, anyway.

The coffin was then taken down to the burial ground. We followed behind and stood round the grave, a gouge in the grass sentried by a rectangle of small olive trees. There were words said — warm and knowledgable of the man we were interring. Many of them drifted on the air, blurred by the sound of the wind-bothered leaves. Their half-absence, half-presence seemed right, somehow.

There was a harp playing. The coffin was let slip into the grave, by a half-dozen friends. There was a bit of crying, not a lot. People there knew enough about death not to indulge or fall into half-imaginary emotions. When it was over, Bernie hung back — he and his men had a friend's grave to fill in.



Then there was a party, at a gallery in town, by the sea. There were a few of his architectural models — simple, inspired, made of cardboard — and pictures of him on the wall. Over the years, this part of the country has attracted a lot of people whose lives elsewhere, well, didn’t work out. Many of them were artists or at least arty. They were pretty much all there to say goodbye to Barrie. They sat outside, in the late afternoon sun, drank beer and smoked roll-ups. A lot of them seemed to be called Bernie.

There was a lot of food, mostly provided by another friend, Freddy (a woman). So much food, in fact, that, wonderful as it was, there were doggy bags as you left. And that, too, had a sacramental aspect. Somehow, it felt like you were taking a bit of Barrie home with you. I had mine, a pasta dish, for lunch the following day. It tasted really good.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part five*

It’s possibly best to start reading earlier in the series but if you really can’t be bothered, all you really need to know is that I’ve been trying to figure out Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

PS1 In case you need telling, I don’t think all Americans are narcissists or that all America is narcissist. Or even that the invasion of Iraq was necessarily a totally bad thing or completely stupid idea. Just that narcissism and solipsism were big players in the badnesses and stupidities of the invasion and what came after.

PS2 Spending so many hours at the cinema with my sons and daughters gave me a deep appreciation for children’s films. Most of them are far better made, acted and plotted than adult films. Children’s passion for logic and consistency is so often worn down as they grow older, their own passion eclipsed by their wish to have their own thoughts supplanted by another’s withered hysterias. How else to explain the status of, say, Ken Loach or Mike Leigh?

PS3 My daughter’s current rave is Toy Story 3. She’s grown-up. She watched it on her laptop, a bootleg recorded on a phone from a mid-row seat in some American or Israeli multiplex. I can’t do that. I’m a grown-up grown-up. I’d love to see it at the cinema but I no longer have any children to take me. If I went by myself, they’d think I was a paedophile. And I had enough of those as a child myself, watching cartoons, alone, at long-defunct cartoons-only cinemas on Oxford Street and Victoria Station, moving seat about every five minutes so as to stay one step ahead of their hands. (And I wonder why I’ve just about given up on cinemas.)

Some entertainment?

The last government was always talking about things being ‘world class’. I never quite figured out how — on the Class Scale — that related to footballer’s ‘different class’. Which trumps which**. Oh well, here is a kind of international infant school guide to the world — where everyone is the best at something.

And here is someone who really was the best. Different class or world class or just class? All of them, I guess.

* Of five

** I have the same problem with the Load Scale. I’m never sure which is the greater, a shed-load, a shit-load or a fuck-load?

Next up I’m taking a break for a bit and will return at the start of the football season with — at last — my wonderings about who Freud would have supported in the World Cup. And the Premier League.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part four*

So I’m still finishing up my trawl through my thoughts about Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Having failed to make sense of the film’s surface, I looked for other readings of it which might explain what critics saw in it. I discussed the first possibility — that it was a film about the inherent paradoxes and limits of making a film like Vicky Cristina Barcelona. A social comedy about social comedies, that is. Now I move on to . . .

Two. The only other possible reading of the film to my mind is as an unknowing satire on unknowingness — completely naive in its composition but deeply sophisticated in its end-result. Most pointedly, the film can be read through the prism of the Iraq invasion. Or rather, as a metaphorical trope of the Iraq invasion. Not Rumsfeld’s unknown unknown** but an unknown known — a self-structured blind-spot. The inability to comprehend the other’s otherness — except as undifferentiated otherness***. Which brings us, of course, back to Freud and the unconscious.

By this light, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the film Jean-Luc Godard would have made ‘about’ Iraq — much as Weekend was ‘about’ Vietnam. Well, not quite. That would have been a knowing satire on unknowingness.

It can, then, I guess, best be read as Woody Allen’s own, unknowingly made rumination on both Woody Allen’s strictly bounded conception of the world and his sad and rueful — though unknown to him — knowledge of those limitations and their significance as virtually unmediated reflections of American narcissism.

I hesitate before I write this but I’m coming to think of Vicky Cristina Barcelona as an inadvertent masterpiece, a kind of automatic writing which — quite unconsciously — creates and develops the most vivid and perceptive view both of the workings of the unconscious (in particular, the operation of projection) and of the myopias of an imperial state of mind.

* Of four. Plus postscripts

** Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big admirer of Rumsfeld’s riff about the limits of knowledge. I think it’s one of the smarter things I’ve heard a politician say in many years.

*** Hence, for example, early Rolling Stones records. To ‘love black music’ is to departicularise it, depersonalise it. To truly appreciate it — real, mature love, if you like — you have to acknowledge your wish to destroy it, too. Or, at least, your capacity for treating it with off-hand disdain. Hence the wonders of later Rolling Stones records****.

**** The psychoanalytically inclined might notice my larceny of Winnicott’s 1947 paper Hate in the Counter-transference*****.

***** The psychoanalytically inclined might also notice that my larceny and warping of Winnicott shows a true appreciation of his work******.

****** The non-psychoanalytically inclined have probably had enough. Even the psychoanalytically inclined, too, I reckon.

Next up The postscript. Well, postscripts, actually.

Meanwhile . . .

Les Them, a young woman called Gloria and . . . a donkey

The little known martial artistry of Red Bull cannery