Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and night.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.

Kahlil Gibran

How to Live begins from an impulse to speak simply of the terms of living. It is an attempt to articulate those things which we have always known, but is guided too by a readiness to uncover things not yet revealed.   It originates from an idea that the work of thinking, (whether it be undertaken by artists, academics or anyone inclined to acts of patient reflection), may be a task that calls upon a collective effort.

This task is one to be pursued with neither velleity nor violence, but with solicitude, and in the spirit of a collective care for the idea of life itself.  The varied and vivid terms of this life (which must include love and grief, justice and freedom amongst its number) are, at once, vast and simple.   If at times these terms seem opaque or oblique, elusive or enigmatic, then at other times, they shine brightly, promising, like touchstones, to fortify the commitment necessary to live out a life whose conditions are not always easy to bear.

How to Live is, at least, an attempt to acknowledge the complexity of the terms of even our daily lives and it is an exhortation to challenge the certainty of our claims to knowledge.  Here then is a place where the philosophical precepts we deduce, the religious beliefs we espouse, the political ideals we cling to, even the simple practices of our daily existence remain subject to our continued learning about a life that continues to exceed our ability to understand it.

At its most ambitious, How to Live seeks to speak of things that are important and immense, but it is a home too for the curious, the quotidian, and the incomplete.  If we elect here to think hard of difficult things, if we strive to seek out our foundational principles, then it is only because we know that we must be prepared to cede those foundations, and that our critical engagement must remain seeking, hungry and desirous.  Our last understanding is always that the things that we live for, the things that give to life its contour, colour and timbre (friendship, love, democracy, justice …), such things will survive us.  How to Live only signals that the task of thinking entrusts these ideals to our continued, collective care.

I was struck the other day when a colleague of mine, describing someone I was anticipating meeting, said, “He’s nice but… well: he’s Welsh.” As I am also cut of that cloth, so to speak, I wondered what on earth she was getting at. What did she mean: Welsh-in-italics? Was I Welsh-in-italics?* How could anyone in this age of identity crisis be so sure of a particular, italicised cultural copyright? “Oh you know: he’s got the black side; he’s extreme. How many Welshmen do you know who are either teetotal or alcoholic?”

Fair do’s. I know lots who are both. I’ve still got my great-grandfather’s certificate proving he was teetotal from The Band of Hope Union of the Methodist Chapel: ‘By divine assistance I will abstain from all intoxicating drinks as beverages and discountenance all the causes and practices of intemperance.’ Signed June 5th 1880. He swore by a whisky before bed - and after, I’m told. But surely non-Welshmen can display this elaborate hypocrisy? Kingsley Amis veered significantly – lurched, perhaps – towards the latter half of the binary of teetotalism and utter drunkdom. Though, to be fair, he bypassed the first term of the binary, and therefore also bypassed hypocrisy, only narrowly bypassing a triple-bypass. Despite this, however, he probably counts as an honorary Welshman. A Welshman in spirit, we might say. Positively doused in the stuff.

In his Booker-winning The Old Devils Amis explores the alchemical properties of booze in conjuring up a misplaced sense of Welshness when Alun Weaver (formerly Alan), poet and telly pundit down on his luck, returns ‘home’ to the land of his fathers. To go In Search of Wales… presents itself to his mind as a soundbite, an opportunity to go on an extended pub-crawl and to revive a few old flames. His band of Old Devils veritably rattle through the jarring modern Wales, ill at ease in their baggy skins, their self-loathing encapsulated by their disgust at Welsh-language signs where ‘Tacsi’ helpfully denotes ‘Taxi’ for ‘the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter x before.’

This self-loathing rings true. We may seem proud of the Grand Slam and all that but come midnight we’ll be weeping in the bogs with the best of them, or at least clutching our duvets over our heads by morning, captains of hungover remorse. Whenever the National Assembly is mentioned, my Skewen-born father will chip in with, “Bloody Welsh!” And I bet you Charlotte Church has had plenty a sob after a binge too far down Chip Alley in Cardiff. And who could blame her? The sociological phenomenon that is going-out-on-the-lash-in-Wales is incomparable, and concentrated, like sickly-sweet squash, in South Wales.

The area covered by the South Wales police force may only represent 10% of the geographical area of Wales, but they are responsible for policing 42% of the local Welsh population. And, boyo, you should see them. The National Assembly for Wales has, and in 2004 assembled over £87,000 to combat the binge drinkers who currently befoul the land of their fathers every weekend. Let’s learn the (non-)lessons of Afghanistan and target the central system of caves: Bridgend, Cardiff, Newport – come out with your hands up.

In 2005, of the 16 - 24 age group in Wales, 36% of men and 27% of women indulged in ‘binge’ at least once a week, according to the Office for National Statistics. According to the jargon of the Assembly/BBC Wales campaign, they got RSOD – an unfortunate acronym for Risky Single Occasion Drinking. Single occasion? Now that’s hopeful. Particularly when you consider that drinking in Wales, especially in my hometown of Bridgend, is almost a vocation. It was a positive ambition for us as fifteen, fourteen-year old girls. With military precision we would enter formation out of the bouncer’s line-of-sight opposite The Welcome to Town, one by one dashing through the door whenever he went to pee, or nipped over to the Olympic Kebab. We worked as a team, but have no doubts that sacrifices had to be made: one of us might get clobbered at any moment, brought down by a dodgy fake i.d., or an influx of seventeen-year olds (they could completely blow your cover). Once taken out, you would gracefully accept defeat (only after trying to get a leg-up over the back wall) and slope home for an early bath, slightly cheered by the thought of that really good film on Channel 4. Oh, how many times I rued S4C: the television station invented to compound humiliation and despair by supplanting Four Weddings and a Funeral with Sgorio or Pobol y Cwm.

But I’m getting carried away… Back to the issue. Being Welsh-in-italics. What does it mean? In search of Wales… In Search of Wales. It’s time for a pub-crawl.

And how obliging my friends are. We got completely RSOD, just like at school. The limo arrived at six, and we were amazed to find that you can actually see out. Why would you want to? But this became a very useful metaphor, as throughout the night I was an increasingly invisible observer. Eventually people couldn’t see me at all, and kept treading on me, dashing me underfoot like a well sucked Lambert & Butler. “How can people afford this?” I asked the Oracle of Chapel Street, Bridgend. “Credit cards,” she replied. And I realised that one could become trapped like an invisible hamster on this wheel of recklessness: swiping, forgetting, remembering, regretting, swiping the memory, and starting again. A bit like sex.

I had to escape to the loo. I was out of the loop; I was a hamster spun off the wheel. You really have to care to binge drink. And I no longer did. In fact, I felt like getting mean. A befeathered girl took a step too far when she pushed in to the queue for the ladies’. “It’s alright,” she explained, still attractive, but lined, creased from binge. “I work here: I’m allowed to push in.” I contemplated a wild cat-scratch, a punch, a grabbing of hair and feather and a pluck, but I have moved on from those days and simply said, as I thought: “That’s OK. You’ll probably never have love in life.” It proved to be the meanest thing I have ever said. Hush descended as The Feathered Girl (so called as my friends hid me from her in my conviction that she would slit my throat) tottered out, shell-shocked. “That was a bit harsh,” I heard as I gently closed the cubicle door. And I suddenly understood. Epiphany came, as I’m sure it always does, half-soaked, remorseful in a public-toilet cubicle: the binge is all about love.

You have to care to binge, to throw your body three sheets to the wind, to drain your bank account and your brain. You have to want something in return. And that something is love. Even in the state of pure sexual desire, next day no-strings-attached, it’s about love. Acceptance into The Welcome to Town was all we could hope for at fourteen. Amis seemed to understand this, how booze and need and sex all tangle up into this horrible mess that is life. As did his friend, Larkin: ‘Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.’ And beneath that? Solitude.

As towns like Bridgend grow outwards, their enormous, labyrinthine housing estates impinging on the green, green grass of home, they lose their centre, forming a map of our selves, the old tabernacles now gutted and filled with drink. But let’s not hark back to the halcyon, hypocritical days of the Chapel and the unfulfilled Pledge; let’s try to understand this new attempt at community. Let’s try to understand what runs beneath this search for love that is binge drinking. C’mon, mun: let’s go on a bloody pub-crawl.

*I’ve double-checked my source and apparently I am Welsh. Symptoms, however, include being ‘vaguely psychic’ (scared of Jesus) and ‘garrulous’ (drunk) – so perhaps this whole theory wasn’t worth investigating in the first place. I got a few drinks and a limo ride out of it, though.

When I was a child, I wasn’t so much scared of ghosts, as scared of seeing Jesus. I was terrified by the thought of him appearing at the foot of my bed, in a halo of light. It’s not that I thought he would hurt me; I simply felt that true awe would be overwhelming: a state that would probably result in my death. Either that or my mother would find me literally petrified in bed, all scrunched up like a cat on the side of the road. Once I played dead when my mother came upstairs to check on me, then laughed: gotcha. She didn’t think it was funny and walked away in disgust.

I enjoy talking now about things I would never have shared as a child. For instance, last year, after watching Michael Haneke’s Caché with her (“he must have been so brave,” she said, about Majid), I told my mother about the time (I must have been about four or five) when, playing with a vicar’s son and two little girls who lived on my street, we discovered the dead body of a baby bird. “May the Lord strike down whichever one of us stood on this bird,” said the vicar’s son. I had always assumed I was the culprit; I was never sure it wasn’t me. But when I told my mother this she laughed and said it was probably the vicar’s son, the little turd. I suddenly felt better after all those years.

The other week when I went out to a pub quiz in Bridgend (not as yet) with a heavily pregnant Emma and a not-at-all pregnant Emma, I told the story of a haunted house I had once stayed in. It was an old house in France owned by an English couple who, while I was getting my cases from the car, told one and all about the priest who was due to visit in order to carry out an exorcism. “Do. Not. Tell. Nemonie.” (sic) my boyfriend advised, on account of my being a known sissy. He then spent most of the holiday in a state of profound terror as, after he’d drunk his way towards sleep, I’d tend to say things like, “Can you hear those children singing?” Eventually, when I asked him why he was so haggard, he replied “Look. The house is haunted, OK?” in the fractured tones more usually employed to register ‘pain’ in teen dramas. I told one Emma that I actually wouldn’t have been frightened of seeing a ghost anyway; that I’d always been more frightened at the thought of seeing Jesus. She gave me such a look of understanding. Then she told me the story of her Grandma G.

Grandma G’s mother lost a child, and she cried and cried on its grave day after day. Eventually Jesus (sic) visited Grandma G’s mother and gestured to her that she must stop crying now because she was to have another child. When Grandma G was born, one of the pupils of her eyes was shaped like a teardrop, and always was. I met Grandma G. She had petit mal, a kind of catalepsy that meant she might fall asleep and then forget where she was, or go back in time. She was happy and giggly, but sad. She had a voice like a cat’s miaow. Grandma G used to tell Emma the story about her mother and Jesus, and Emma was terrified to think that Jesus might visit her too.

I’ve never understood that part of religion which dismisses what is human. Nonetheless, neither Emma nor I wanted Jesus to visit us with his big blue eyes and his centre parting. In Bridgend. No siree.

Queer in Europe

Forthcoming research symposium to be held at the University of Exeter organised by the amazing Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett.

We’ll return soon to the correspondences between kissing and cannibalism, but, for now, here is some reading matter: Jean-Luc Nancy, in a translation by Douglas Morrey in the journal Film-Philosophy, on Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day. If you get to the end of Icon of Fury - if you get to the end of Trouble Every Day - you’ll probably fancy a bit of a sit down and a cup of tea.

Film-Philosophy, Nancy and Denis

Someone recently attempted to console my ex-boyfriend (who anyway didn’t exactly need consoling) by explaining to him that I’m actually not that nice. This seems to me a misrepresentation, as I’m by no means as nasty as I’d like to be sometimes. I’m constantly afflicted by esprit d’escalier - that smack in the face on the escalator of life. I want to use this blog as a forum for my doggedly belated shut-’em-ups and put-’em-downs, which otherwise lodge in my heart like so many poisonous splinters stalled on the circuit of human contact. I’ll get this going, however, with a faithful transcript of a dialogue which took place, in reality, between me and another person, in the county of Devon during Easter of this year, 2008.

Annoying Woman: Where in Wales are you from?

Me: Bridgend.

Annoying Woman: {a look of dread flashing across her face} Oh. Oh dear. But you haven’t…

Me: Killed myself?

Annoying Woman: YES!

Me: Not as yet.

 X-Factor Contestant Stabs Cowell in Face

Ennobled since 1782
Newsletter 899 : August 2008: “I say: Capital Ring, old chap.”

Dear Walkers,

I am afraid I have been rather delayed in producing our newsletters of late. The Holy Roman Empire of my mind has been somewhat in disarray. I removed myself to a ruined Cistercian abbey in France, in the hope that a change of air would restore my spirits. Unfortunately the abbey finds itself next to a designated ‘yoga retreat’, and I have often found myself engaged in intercourse for longer than I might have wished with people who consider themselves ‘philosophers’ despite having freely chosen their quite unnerving hose. I, of course, have never practised philosophy in the strict sense of the word (see Wikipedia), and wear hose of only the thickest wool.

Yesternight I stepped out to appreciate the colours of the evening, and was most alarmed to find a man crouching in my doorway. He was rather disturbed after hearing the cry of what he took to be a lycanthrope from the woods surrounding us. This fellow is named Tom and he usually resides in your Bedfordshire. I reassured him that there could be no such creatures nearby, and the conversation soon fell on other animal encounters. Tom told me that, in the lanes surrounding Bedford, he had once chanced upon a badger which had, in his words, been ‘twatted’ by some form of vehicle moving apace. Tom, keen to revive the poor beast, had sped home to fetch his pan-flute, whereupon he proceeded to play, for the unconscious creature, to no discernible effect, until such time as an officer of the law saw fit to escort him within the confines of his own property. Sometimes medical problems are more simply resolved by professionals, I averred. I have not left my barn since this encounter.

For this reason I now find myself at leisure to share some images from our meeting of Autumn 2007, which took us on a journey around London’s Capital Ring (careful). As you will recall, we assembled at the Highgate Tube and took the Parkland Walk, along the deserted railway line that once ran to Alexandra Palace. You might also wish here to refer to the map and notes I had collected to assist us on our way from walklondon.org.uk. You will remember, of course, the ‘spriggan’ who threatens our Pinny from the railway arches. We can rest assured that no baby spriggan will replace the dear babe we can expect to join us on our walks in the future. That’s right, fellow Walkers: she has definitely done it with him (you know, the one with the dyed hair).

Enjoy the images, linked to below, and keep stretching those calves in the expectation that when I return to London we shall enjoy more walks together and that I shall be your unchanged

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Highgate to Stoke Newington