Folk Critique has an amazing moment where Ross compares TFO to vaporwave. It (along with previous Fair Organ pamphlets) will be on sale at the event, or can be bought separately here.

Other bits of news: I gave a reading of How to Live Together and then talked about it with the psychoanalyst Rachel Chaplin at 10 Windsor Walk as part of the IOPA’s Maudsley lecture series. I might write more about this at some point, although, like other people, I have less desire to write for Substack at the moment. Rachel analysed one of the dreams in the novel, a remarkable experience.

This dream was one of a selection I read at Xing the Line’s 25th birthday celebration the other weekend, outside the Old Church in Stoke Newington. There were something like 80 poets reading, many of the names long admired and known from mailing lists but never met. I found it at times hard not to get restless and so managed to miss people I wish I had not missed, but I did get to hear, twice, Jeff Hilson’s deeply moving list of all of the poets who had read at Xing the Line and were no longer alive, among them Fanny Howe, Sean Bonney, Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, R. F. Langley – the list gets shorter every time I repeat it and I am frustrated not to remember who else was on it. There was a prize for everyone who spoke for under half the allocated time, and a loudspeaker instruction to leave the stage if you strayed a second over, as well as various noises to give you ample warning.

And finally, the next episode of Will René’s NTS show Plastic Language will include some of Alan Fielden’s 99 Plays, recorded at a fundraiser that was secretly – or at least unknown to me – also a birthday party for Alan. I am in one of them!

Some Flowers Soon

Pinks #42: An Outside to Language

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4 months ago · 30 likes · 2 comments · Jeremy Noel-Tod

In it, he quotes the Awards’ statement on the importance of poetry pamphlets –

Historically, and still, often small presses have been labours of love, individually crafting each pamphlet.

– and I thought I would write a quick piece on the specifics of that labour.

Hugh Foley’s Recent Poems, which I edited and designed last summer with Grace Connolly Linden (and which was also mentioned by Jeremy – thank you!), was shortlisted for the pamphlet award. The orders that came in as a result of the shortlisting exhausted the first run of 100, and so we had to print a new run quite quickly.

Until now, The Fair Organ has worked with printers, specifically earthbound press and Burley Fisher Community Press, to make our pamphlets. BFCP, who printed Hugh’s pamphlet before, were at capacity, but Emma, who runs it, offered to give us training in using their Risograph printer, guillotine, etc. so that we could do it ourselves, which we (Grace and I) went and did this weekend. I love printing and printmaking but I’m much better at precision on a screen than with paper and ink, and I was slightly anxious that my cack-handedness would mean a huge drop-off in quality. But being able to carry out every stage of the process of making the pamphlet is good, exciting, important – even if just for knowing how to design the pamphlet in the first place. (I have been meaning to write here about a black and white photograph printing course I took recently, in which the same applies.)

It was fascinating, frustrating and absorbing work. The poems, as they were printed and cut and assembled, flickered between, on the one hand, arrangements of ink on a page that have to be carefully aligned, and, on the other, language itself, with individual lines catching my eye as I ordered the sheets for stapling: ‘Down the cheeks of infancy… Abhorrent, man’, ‘Back in the day we had static’, ‘Orpheus’s stuff still bangs’. (Or ink on a finger – this from ‘My Apes’:)

I was also struck by the kind of anxiety and disgust that accompanies things that you have made yourself, something that having an external printer somehow does away with. Certainly I felt more critical about these pamphlets, more aware of variation between the copies and of the way that with riso there are always quirks of alignment. Lifting the printed A3 sheets to the light to check if recto and verso were in the same place, you could see the way that, where page numbers in one part of the sheet were perfectly aligned, at the edges they would be one or two millimetres out – which with an A6 pamphlet is quite a lot, but is a feature of the medium. And as Grace said at the end, it was striking to find out quite how many ways you could go wrong, how many opportunities there were for making mistakes. I found it surprisingly tiring, with every stage requiring a concentration that was both mental and physical; both fingers and mind could slip and give you a double cover, or trim too much, or miss a sheet that the Risograph had skipped and left unprinted. Mistakes and trials became objects in their own right, like this which Grace claimed for herself, and these single sheet poems and covers which I intend to distribute somehow and somewhere:

Maybe one of the biggest downsides of doing your own printing is not being able to admire and praise someone else’s work; I love receiving pamphlets from the printer, seeing how someone else’s technical skill has turned a pdf into an object, made of an idea something beautiful. Here, I suppose, I can instead praise and admire the training Emma gave us, and how good it is to work with Grace – and, of course, Hugh’s poems. Here is an excerpt from the longer poem, ‘The Sole Unquiet Thing’, at the centre of the pamphlet:

And here is a link to buy it, in advance of the awards ceremony on the 9th June:

https://lindentree.bigcartel.com/product/recent-poems-by-hugh-foley

I had been spoilt in Oxford. There, the three churches where I had gone to Mass – which were also more or less the three closest to where I lived – were each at the centre of a community of religiously full-on people. By this I mostly mean the lay congregations, although the fact that each was run by a religious order or community – the Jesuits, the Dominicans, the Oratorians – contributed to the sense of intensity. And this intensity was a liturgical intensity. Many people went to Mass more than weekly, some daily, and also to other services – Vespers, Benediction. In each of the churches, while differing in style and level of formality, the liturgy was carried out as if nobody found it boring, and for that reason it wasn’t.

But another way in which I had been spoilt, one that I only grasped when I moved, was in the standard of the preaching. And one of the crucial ways it had been good was that it had been short. Perhaps one or two priests were inclined to waffle, but, generally, homilies were well-structured pieces of oratory which, when they began, gave a sense of when they would end. They offered one clear idea without ranging too widely; whether read out or extemporised, delivered in a loud voice or quietly and intimately, they confidently inhabited the time and attention and sound-space that was theirs, and then retreated from it again, with a smoothness and regularity of pacing that felt instinctive, organic. The homily offered a moment in which the liturgical tension eased for a few minutes, when you could sit and breathe and shuffle your feet and maybe be a bit distracted before returning to the flow of the familiar prayers.

In London, I found myself dreading the homily from the start of the service. I would look to see which priests were there that week and pray that it was this one, who had slightly less tendency to ramble, and not that one, who narrated lengthy and confused anecdotes, who would be delivering the homily (like the common joke, I forget where I first encountered it, in which a benefit of a long homily is that it moves people to pray – that is, for it to end). On top of this, I often felt that there seemed less confidence in the rest of the liturgy being beautiful and worth being there for, and so it was carried out apologetically or awkwardly; silence was avoided, optional parts of the rubric kept to a minimum.

I moved house and it was the same. I tried out other churches nearby. It wasn’t the case everywhere, but the times I went out of my way to go to services I knew I would enjoy left me feeling empty and guilty, as if I were exercising consumer choice around religious practice, when the point of the church was its catholicity, its universality. It became an obsession, in which my entire weekend was structured around wanting to avoid the discomfort of a long, rambling sermon, which felt as if it might never end, and the mounting panic at the idea that perhaps it just wouldn’t – a panic that sometimes felt shared by the priest: I often had the image of an aeroplane circling, unable to land, or a car that had missed the turn-off and was racing forwards, unable to leave the motorway. And to avoid, as well, the discomfort of knowing that everything leading up to the homily would be ruined by the expectation of it, and that everything that came after would be tainted by guilt at having been so distracted by my boredom up to that point, and guilt also at my relief that the homily was over.

It struck me that my attunement to boredom – at Mass and elsewhere – came from quite how un-boring London was in every other respect. You never had to be bored – there was always something specific you could be doing, often far too many things. There was stimulation everywhere. All those bits of possibly dead time – of which there were many more than in a small city, all the time waiting for buses and sitting on buses, or spent cycling down long, hectic roads with complex traffic lights that could not be done on autopilot, all the buffer time at beginnings and ends of journeys, in general the hugely expanded amount of time given over to ‘logistics’ and transitions – were nonetheless not ‘boring’, because they were stressful and stimulating in other ways. And because of all this time dedicated just to living in the city, there was much less time – and energy – left over for doing boring things (and also non-boring things!). In London I almost never went to events that I didn’t think I would like or spent time at gatherings of people I didn’t have much in common with.

And more than in Oxford, I felt I had very little in common with the people at Mass. I had previously belonged to congregations of adults. (There were dedicated family services – the famous 9.30 Mass which never began until around 10 – which I avoided.) What I had liked about Mass was how it allowed you to be alone with others. As a way of being more involved at church I had volunteered with a new scheme to welcome people at the doors with hymn books and Mass sheets; it was interesting to see how many people simply did not want to be welcomed, and I often thought that I, too, might not have wanted to be welcomed, that anonymity and privacy were what had allowed me to start going to Mass in the first place. It was only much later – chiefly during the Covid lockdowns – that I appreciated and actually looked forward to the social aspects of Mass, the coffee and tea afterwards, sitting next to my friends.

In London the social could not be suspended in the way I wanted it to be. People sat in family groups, pockets of social energy and attention. Every week I compulsively looked around to see if there were any other single adults, but these were a minority, and mostly elderly. Everyone my age or thereabouts had children. (Some, I realised with disappointment from the notices, must only have been there in order to get those children into certain schools.) And it was to families and communities that these less absorbing Masses were tailored. This was a moment in the week for people to mark their allegiance to a community, to have a primarily social, rather than religious, experience. For this reason there was less focus on the contemplative parts of the Mass, and more on the homily – the point of which is, after all, to connect the readings from Scripture with the lives of the members of the congregation. The homily, the (to my ears) naff hymns and Mass settings, the endless notices before the final blessing – here were moments where the parish could understand itself as a community, could feel recognised and recognise itself. I was bored because I didn’t feel recognised, and didn’t want to.

In February a friend suggested I come to a Candlemas service at Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, where he was singing in the choir. When I got there I realised it was going to be in what’s called the Extraordinary Form – that is, the form of the Mass as it was between 1570 and 1970, said in Latin, with more complexity and repetition. My first response was of anxiety and alienation, because I associate the Extraordinary Form with political and social conservatism; I noticed several women wearing head coverings and worried I would look too gay, too secular. But also I worried that I would be bored, because it would probably be very long and full of extended and sometimes inaudible passages in Latin (deliberately inaudible, that is, as part of the rubric) – which is, of course, something like what I believed I wanted, but, you know, in moderation.

The service was, however, not boring. ‘Difficult’, perhaps, in the way of art cinema or music: a challenge to the attention, and, because of its unfamiliarity to me, full of surprises and moments where I didn’t understand what was going on. It wasn’t boring partly because it was very beautiful, to which my friend’s choir certainly contributed, but also because in its propulsive flow there was nothing awkward or jarring, and nothing ‘social’. This was a kind of togetherness that was private, in which we all minded our own businesses, had an unanxious, disinterested sense of closeness – we were marked in our relations by our mutual otherness. No one cared who I was or why I was there. Nor, indeed, if I was too gay – and in any case Corpus Christi is, as my friend told me afterwards, the actors’ church; I was hardly the only one.

I’ve only recently come to connect boredom and the social. I’ve often thought of the opposite of boredom as intensity – an experience, like the Mass, that, whatever its repetitions and difficulties, is undiluted, allowing for a purity of presence and attention. I grew up with the idea that only boring people were bored; like Berryman, ‘my mother told me as a boy | (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored | means you have no | Inner Resources.’ As a child I would never have named an experience as one of boredom, and even as an adult I have only recently started noticing that boredom, or an experience that could have this name, is something I go out of my way to avoid – not, in the way that is constantly commented on now, by doomscrolling or whatever, but by avoiding situations where I am cut off from my Inner Resources. Mass is boring when I can’t just daydream through it in its repetitive familiarity and instead am disturbed by constantly having to notice my relation to others. Similarly, what is boring are situations of ‘ambient’, purposeless, unstructured socialising, situations which seem to me uncomfortably ‘diluted’ – especially those that have no obvious end point, what a friend calls ‘unlimited hang’.

For a long time I let the Christian emphasis on friendship become a convenient excuse for avoiding the boredom of erotic love, the agreed-on limits of friendship allowing for a particular kind of intensity and attention that was unavailable in the unlimited hang of love and particularly sex. I once actually said during sex that I was bored, a moment that often comes back to me with horror. I didn’t say it without thinking, exactly, but somehow what I thought was that I was doing something kind by taking on the social stigma of saying this terrible thing, which I assumed was what she was thinking but wasn’t able to say. It was only when I was willing to be bored that I was actually able to fall in love, as I wrote about here a few months ago. And through that I came to see (or be reminded) that sex isn’t boring. Perhaps in the early stages it is, when it is full of anxious disconnection and acute social awareness, when you can’t be yourself, when you are struck by the fear that it might never end, by the anxiety of having to reject them to leave and get on with your life. But otherwise sex is the good kind of repetitive, its meaning and richness coming from familiarity, and also, perhaps, from this comforting sense of being alone – private, unreachable, other – together.

In a sermon on prayer, the theologian Herbert McCabe describes prayer as ‘really a waste of time, an absolute waste of time.’ His point is the pointlessness, the unproductiveness of prayer – ‘the very heart of prayer is not getting anything done’ – but this point is made through the idea of unlimited hang, prayer as sharing in the ‘waste of time which is the interior life of the Godhead’, a god who ‘is love, and his life is not like the life of the worker or artist but of lovers wasting time with each other uselessly.’ I read this early in my conversion and it stayed with me, because what it describes is a situation of terrifying boredom. Certainly I have always found prayer, personal prayer, boring and frustrating, and so turned to structures like the Mass, or like a group I was part of who did Lectio Divina together. I was recently struck to see the same sentiment in a book on psychoanalysis, Akshi Singh’s In Defence of Leisure: ‘Maybe psychoanalysis is worthwhile not in spite of the time it takes, but precisely for all the time it seemingly wastes.’ Again, the emphasis is on unproductiveness, but I liked the idea of the analytic relationship as a place to learn how to waste time.

I can feel myself becoming the priest who cannot pilot his homily to a safe landing, partly in awareness of all of the things I have not said – deliberately, like the politics of liturgical styles, or of the connection between boredom and parenting, which sounds to me the most boring thing in the world; or regretfully, like a whole section on the Trinity that I cut for being too involved, or the recordings of children’s games which reminded me forcefully of the boredom of the playground, the longing for the bell that would allow the structure of the classroom to resume. The relationship between time and repetition in the liturgy, repetition breaking open secular time, like how, as a friend pointed out, Easter Sunday is so good it happens eight times, the same texts being repeated every day in evening prayer for the whole week; the way that Mass used to make the day feel longer, inject it with extra time, where in London it can swallow a whole Sunday in a kind of resentful, frustrated, guilty mud of logistics and transitions. The genre of the sermon and its secular equivalents, such as in nature writing. The boredom I was surprised and ashamed to feel on the flat, straight Roman roads of Norfolk last summer, having always thought I enjoyed that kind of landscape. The psychoanalytic literature on boredom. The opposite of boredom not being stimulation but calm.

This piece is sort of a rewriting of one of three short poems I contributed to this anthology, for which the prompt was ‘religion – faith – spirituality’, edited by Linda Kemp. Each poem is based on a misremembered quotation, in this case McCabe’s idea of prayer as a waste of time, and takes on a specific preoccupation – boredom, surprise, the body and the way that the alone-togetherness of Mass takes place through bodily mimicry and shared gesture – which had come from my thinking about or experience of Catholicism and that in some sense answered the question of why I was a Catholic (rather than nothing at all, but also, rather than an Anglican). I will write about surprise and idolatry (and politics and psychoanalysis) soon; in the meantime, support Futch Press and buy the pamphlet, which includes poems by Jack Belloli, Lucy Lovell, Sarah Cave, Jamie Lee, Nadira Wallace and Andrew Taylor. And happy Easter!

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I hope Rose would herself forgive my lack of charity here, or see in it something of her own spirit. Perhaps it is unfair to say that she is using it wrongly, because by ‘wrong’ I don’t mean ‘untrue’ – indeed what I think she makes of it is true, and the point of this post – but that her use of it is wrongly implied to be the same as Silouan’s, and so Orthodox Christianity’s.

To begin with, in the original account, these words are not St Silouan’s, but God’s. The phrase comes from a specific episode in the saint’s life. For years he had suffered from the distracting belief that he was spiritually exceptional. This is the sin of spiritual pride – the belief that you are, spiritually speaking, a bit better than everyone else, holier, doing all the right things, repenting in the right ways and so forgiven. Whenever Silouan tried to pray, he was beset by demons, who taunted him by saying ‘You are a saint’ but then ‘You will never be saved’. He wanted to be sure which was true.

As a novice he had had a vision of Christ. It was an experience of grace of a remarkable intensity, and he desperately wanted a repeat of this state, but instead it became harder and harder to pray at all. Not only this but the vision itself, the fact that he had experienced it, and at such a young age, made it all the harder to resist the idea that he was exceptional. He took up increasingly ascetic practices, sleeping upright on a hard stool, doing manual labour, fasting. But instead of bringing himself closer to God, he pushed himself away, because he wasn’t doing all of these things out of love, but out of pride.

After many years, during an episode in which there were a huge number of demons crowding his cell, with one huge demon blocking the icon in order to make Silouan bow before him, Silouan asked God for help.

‘Lord, you see that I wish to pray to you with a clear mind, but the demons won’t let me. Teach me what I must do so that they cannot distract me.’ And the answer came from within his soul, ‘The proud always suffer like this from demons.’ ‘Lord,’ said Siluan, ‘teach me what I must do to humble my soul.’ Once again the answer came from his heart: ‘Keep your mind in hell and don’t lose hope.’ (source; see also the standard account of the saint’s life)

It’s important, then, that these are words attributed to God and not to Silouan, because Silouan’s problem is self-reliance. He believes he knows what to do, and believes he knows what he deserves from doing it, which is salvation. (What is deserved is also a return of spiritual intensity, something I sympathise with.) The problem with spiritual pride in particular is not that you are doing the wrong things; you are doing the right things – giving alms, helping others, praying, fasting, etc. – but for the wrong reason. You are not doing them because you love God, and because you see that through your openness to him he is working through you; instead it is you who are doing it all, and you who are taking the credit, and you who believe that all this makes you a little bit better than everyone else.

To avoid the sin of pride – the worst of all the sins – and achieve the humility that will allow him to get closer to God, Silouan first has to give up his belief that he is in charge of his own salvation. In order to do that he has to keep his mind in hell – that is, to know himself to be a sinner and to be bound for hell. And to do this, to hold this knowledge, with such intensity that he is literally already in hell – because it is said of Silouan and other Christian ascetics that they had the ability to place themselves in hell while still on earth, to experience its torments and to be surrounded by its demons. (The account I am getting this from says that Silouan had, after this, a new ‘favourite song’: ‘Soon I will die, and my cursed soul will descend into the closed black confines of hell, and there I alone will burn in a dark flame and cry for the Lord, “Where are You, light of my soul? Why have You deserted me? I cannot live without you”.’)

But at the same time he must also not lose hope – that is, lose hope in God’s mercy. This would also be a sin, the sin of despair, in which one believes that one is simply too wicked to be forgiven – that one’s own acts are more powerful than God’s. Hell is not despair, although in Silouan’s case his pride and despair led him to have a supernatural experience of hell, such that they seemed the same. His task is to distinguish the two. So by following both counsels – adopting the practice of imaginatively visiting hell, and simultaneously maintaining hope in God’s forgiveness – Silouan is acknowledging that grace and salvation are not something he has control over. He should perform good works and all his ascetic practices despite knowing that he could – should – go to hell.

The hell of St Silouan is permanent separation from God, i.e. from love. That separation is something which happens after and outside of our world (though it is imaginatively available in this world to a small number of experienced ascetics). Rose’s hell, as I understand it, is different. What we must keep our mind in – which for Rose is more ‘not shy away from’ than ‘dwell on with imaginative intensity’ – is earthly, temporal. It is the knowledge of our vulnerability, the harm we might suffer or cause, and it is also, crudely put, the ‘bad stuff’ that is part of life, the acknowledgement of which will make it possible to live and love more fully, and more authentically, in a way that is closer to the truth. Here is the central passage of Love’s Work that is dedicated to this phrase:

…to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster, could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the terrors of the soul […].

[…] Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity, when it is deprived of its agon. Instead of insinuating that illness may better prepare you for the earthly impossibilities, these enchiridions on Faith, Hope and Love would condemn you to seek blissful, deathless, cosmic emptiness – the repose without the revel.1

Hell is experiences on earth, in the here and now, of ‘agon’ – conflict, difficulty – that are in some sense ‘natural’, like the disasters. These are things, she says, that are proper to life and love, not its antithesis. The examples she gives are of personal suffering – illness, bereavement – and communal. These are present in the idea of natural disaster, here, but also atrocity, such as the Holocaust; the first use of the phrase in the book is in a passage about her mother’s inability to accept that many members of her family were killed in Poland:

Nowadays, my mother denies this; she denies that it happened and she denies that her mother suffered from it, so deep is her own unresolved suffering. This denial and unexamined suffering are two of the main reasons for her all-jovial unhappiness – the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most static despair.

In this passage, as well as in the main section, which I’ve quoted in full below, the main target is forced cheerfulness – ‘all-jovial unhappiness’ – and the ‘positive thinking’ of New Age writing on illness and death (it’s worth recalling that Rose wrote this book when she was dying). One of the people she quotes appears to have believed that you could cure cancer through willpower and positive thoughts, something she likens to the ‘most remorseless protestantism’ (no cap in original). I immediately read this as referring to something that I too often worry about in what I understand as the Calvinist picture of predestination, namely the way that any doubts, lapses, moments of unhappiness and discouragement, could be seen as proof that one is not one of the elect, and is destined for damnation – although my own sense of the cruelty of this position could have affected this reading. In any case there is a difference between doubts indicating damnation and doubts causing it, which – I think – would be a very un-Protestant position to take.

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I wanted to check what other people actually made of the phrase, and to see if anyone had complained about the use of St Silouan before, so I searched for people quoting it on Google Books. I didn’t find any examples of complaint, but I did find enough different glosses to confirm my sense of what the phrase has come to mean, and also my sense that it, and perhaps Love’s Work as a whole, has come to mean all things to all men (which my own example above demonstrates). Some of these glosses understand the phrase psychologically, focusing on problems suffered by the individual or interpersonally. Others are political, understanding it as a programme of a shared response to a specific historical moment. For some people, Rose is talking about love, romantic love, with hell and despair being the inevitable suffering and temptations to cause suffering that it involves us in. For others,

to be in hell and to despair is to be melancholic. And it’s not to be able to find a way through. To be in hell is to be able to experience the negations and the losses and the difficulties of your life.

But to try to come to understand them, live with them truthfully, not seek to overcome them, but to have them negated and preserved. So you know them differently and you live them differently. (Rebekah Howes, on the podcast mentioned above)

Of the readings I have called political, there is one in which the emphasis is on hell as external circumstance, ‘wrong life’:

‘Philosophy is keeping one’s mind in hell, in the violence and cruelty of the present, and not despairing, but going on, making, creating, affirming.’ (Simon Critchley)

And one where it is on hell as our own compromised responses to this violence and cruelty:

‘to interrogate our complicity in practices and structures of misrecognition and to take the risk of acting politically in response’ (Kate Schick)

In its emphasis on complicity, this last seems to me to bring us closest to the hell that I understand: here is a picture of us acknowledging our own sinfulness and nonetheless hoping that all is not lost, we can still collaborate in goodness too. And yet as a reading of Rose this seems insufficient, as it cannot account for the inclusion, in her examples, of random, undeserved loss or disaster, in which one cannot be complicit – although there are ways of being complicit in misrecognition, or sin, in one’s response to these experiences. Those glosses which do emphasise ‘negations and losses’, the ‘violence and cruelty of the present’, on the other hand, secularise more fully the idea of hell, making of it something like the everyday use in which it is an experience of almost impossible horror that an individual might undergo unjustly. But the point of hell is that it is not something that happens to you. You go there because you insisted on going there – you insisted on doing things by yourself. Rose’s hell, and all of these versions of it mentioned above, are peopled – it is to do with the pain of being in love with another person, or is a situation marked by their loss, it is a communal experience in which people suffer and work together. What she calls hell is the experience of being human; it is denying hell that isolates. But hell, the Christian hell, is lonely. It is you, alone. You turned away from love.

The reading that seems to me most convincing as a possible way to bridge the gap between Silouan and Rose is the answer Rowan Williams gave to the question I began with.

It’s a key question. I think the hell that she’s talking about is the sheer awareness of one’s own separation, one’s own compromised history, one’s own lack of purity. That is hell if you interpret it as judgment and necessity.

But if you don’t see it as judgment and necessity, but as truthfulness, it means you’re liberated from despair because you do not have to make yourself pure. And so that delivers you into a kind of hope, the kind of hope of failing better, failing better. But the hell is real because we’ve just heard [a few pages before] about the tragic inexorability of the king’s [i.e. Arthur’s] condition, the compromise, the collusion, the complicity.

And denying that, as I said earlier, denying that is actually the way to stay in hell, in despair. Accepting it is the way of not despairing. I think.

When I first read Love’s Work, in a phase of greater piety and also pedantry to now, I was very intrigued to know what Williams, whom I knew to be a friend of Rose’s, made of what seemed to me a scandalous misuse of Christian theology. Here, he begins with the idea of separation, which is how I understand hell in Christian terms. I think his swerve at the beginning of the second paragraph is sneaky: Rose’s account is not about judgement and necessity, i.e. about damnation, but she nonetheless says it is hell that she is talking about. But Williams’s point about impurity and hope seems to me to get at the point of the story of Silouan: that only by understanding ourselves as compromised, or, in another jargon, sinners, can we be free from the belief that we could make ourselves pure, morally perfect.

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This strikes me as a useful thing to keep in mind. The idea of sin gets a bad rap but I have found it helpful as a way to think about, and accept, being morally ordinary. Certainly when I first converted, the concept of sin came as a relief, because it offered an account of how and why, when all of the right things had been done and the right processes followed, it was still possible to make moral mistakes (the unconscious, which at that point was still a niche interest on the left, also offers this, as in this entertaining review by Hannah Proctor). Indeed the guidelines of secular ethics were often used as a way to not have to admit a mistake, to put oneself beyond reproach, because a mistake would be the worst thing in the world, something that exposed an inner inadequacy – a secular Protestantism, at least in my partial understanding of it, in which any failure implies lack of faith and therefore exclusion from the elect. Faith, that is, being a ‘good person’, then becomes an anxious and defensive project of never letting the mask slip, and never letting any inconvenient detail get in the way of a coherent story of one’s own goodness.

The theologian James Alison talks about conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism in these terms:

The result is that one of the first fruits of the relaxation which comes with faith is a loss of a story of goodness, a loss of a self-innocenting story, a loss of a defensive story about ‘how right I am’, because you don’t need a story about how right you are. You are being given a story about how loved you are. And this is what it means to be able to see yourself as a sinner: far from ‘seeing yourself as a sinner’ being some sort of moralistic demand that you browbeat yourself and come up with a list of alleged failings, being able to see yourself as a sinner is merely the sign that you are able to hold yourself peacefully and realistically as being who you are, non-defensively, because you know yourself loved. You are no longer frightened of being seen to be, or actually being, a failure.

The concept of sin entails the acknowledgement of failure as a possibilitity, and this is more freeing than ideas of goodness and badness as identities. The demons say, ‘you are a saint’ and ‘you shall not be saved’, and make you forget that in fact, like everyone else, you are ordinary. That you are not perfect does not mean you are necessarily a monster. The coherent story is not one about purity, as Williams puts it, but about love.

In telling the story of St Silouan’s struggle against spiritual pride I have emphasised the idea of self-reliance – and not its cure, humility – because I wanted it to have more purchase in a secular context. I write about Christianity because I am interested in the existing overlaps, and because I want to make its ideas comprehensible, attractive, useful to the secular or non-Christian left. So I’m not against Rose’s use of the phrase because I think theological ideas should not be borrowed for politics or ethics, and I also don’t think that her gloss of it is incompatible with Christian ideas more broadly. The two main directions that the left has taken Rose’s use of the phrase seem helpful ones. I feel justified in wanting to keep separate secular uses of the word ‘hell’ from the Christian hell, precisely because the Christian idea of hell, as permanent separation from love, is worth everyone knowing. But I’m probably mostly annoyed at Rose for what seems to me her wilful and reckless mischaracterisation of an idea that she attributes to someone else. This annoyance may seem reasonable, but is in the end probably just another mistaken longing for purity.

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When I finally did have someone over, this is exactly what happened: the piles collapsed, the top books sliding off on to our backs, and it was as funny as I thought it would be, and in a certain way nice, and exciting, a kind of gentle dramatic moment, like tearing off somebody’s clothes or sweeping everything off a table. But it also got in the way; and the piles themselves were (and still are) a distraction, visual and psychological clutter. I realised that having externalised my self through books I now felt a bit disgusted by the process and the result. I didn’t turn against them, but found them irrelevant in the moment, an intrusion into a scene where a different self was getting to surface.

This has been one of the surprising parts of love, this last year and a bit. Uncovering other selves, some that were in a way new, some that I had forgotten about. Selves that I remembered from a long time ago, before I was into walking and birds and waking up early to write – selves who, for instance, got something out of a breakfast that lasts all day, idleness, light in a north-facing room. But also the more childlike, playful, silly selves. Being half-asleep and saying nonsense, or, worse, things that make perfect sense but that you would never have said fully awake. Being out of control in other ways, and that not being disastrous.

In the years of thinking I ought to try to date but not yet being bothered to, I worried a lot about age – about how surely everyone in their mid- to late 30s was set in their ways, a mess of irreversibly ingrained bad habits, intolerant, fussy: a hardened self that was no longer malleable, with fixed preferences. And all the worse if they were single. I looked at myself and saw this almost literal fortress that I had built up around my singleness. (I also have a pull-up bar which, in my low doorframe, keeps out all of my mostly tall housemates.) It seemed this could only be true of other single people my age, that, one way or another, we’d all backed ourselves into a corner, where loving other people was now a problem. But it turned out that, in many ways, I was better equipped to love now that I was a bit older, and so were other people. More understanding, more tolerant, less impulsive – but at the same time bolder, more assertive, better able to speak clearly.

I had wanted love to be the things that Christian writing and queer theory had it as – something destructive, an un-making of the self, something which broke in and rearranged everything. (I also wanted the same of psychoanalysis.) But it turned out that this seeming opposition of fortification and destruction was the thing to which love itself was opposed. Instead, it was more about being able to be many contradictory things in quick alternation, or even at once, without any one cancelling the other out or leading to its annihilation. And this was frustrating, because these were things – selves – that I wanted to be mutually exclusive. I wanted the drama of destruction, of a complete changing of the guard. What love destroyed was the illusion that this was possible.

Some of these selves were ones unearthed from deep down and basically disgusting and unacceptable to me now. (For a while my paradigmatic experience of love had been a friend asking me what my favourite Manu Chao song was as a way to cheer me up. We had never even discussed Manu Chao, but he knew me well enough to know that I would have an answer to this question. I had long felt ashamed of having ever listened to Manu Chao and so his gesture felt not only a recognition of who I was in that moment, but who I had ever been.) And this was also a question of gender. It was not only that these fortified single selves, based around the ideas of solitude and stamina and intensely pursued hobbies that my books represented, masculine selves; the very idea of the fortified self, emotionally independent etc., was a masculine one. But, again, the opposite was not detransition. And in the same way that the books, which I surrounded myself with as a challenge to potential lovers (which was also a challenge to do with politics and taste and intellectualism), came to feel a bit irrelevant, so did some of my anxieties about having to be wholly masculine or not at all. In a way I had wanted love (and even more so psychoanalysis) to tell me I was wrong about my gender, to purify me of all untruths. The biggest challenge has been accepting impurity.

Something I found I had learnt, in a way to my surprise, in the years since last having a partner, was a tolerance for ambivalence and uncertainty, or at least the capacity to develop it. Not running at the first doubt or the first longing for the simplicity of being single. Not being perplexed or obliterated by the coexistence of hate and love. I already had a kind of theoretical knowledge of this from having read about what it was to be a parent, and it was precisely why I absolutely hated the idea of being a parent. But it turned out it was also true of romantic relationships, and indeed friendships. Annoyance – exasperation, disagreement, disappointment – these weren’t prohibited feelings to be excised as forms of disloyalty, or secrets to be kept that built into distance and coldness. It wasn’t all or nothing. In practice I already knew this, although I don’t know how much I knew that I knew it.

‘It wasn’t all or nothing’ – what a hateful discovery! And this has been also a matter of what I have often called intensity. Writing this I have wondered if my strong preference for south-west facing rooms was ‘telling’. (Or having a preference at all, or even noticing such things – at least according to a friend who read this; but he also claims to want to live without weather, which seems to me very suspicious.) Love has involved learning to get something out of moderation, mildness, boredom (which I want to write about at more length in the context of religion at some point); ‘ambient socialising’, rest, consistency. I wanted love to be something ‘other’, to change what it was that I thought I wanted – but not like that!, I found myself thinking at first. I resented the way that things I had previously experienced intensely – weather, views, sunsets, the moon bright in a cold sky – came to offer less than they once had. (For a while, I worried that writing did, too, that the energy behind it was permanently compromised.) But gradually I found I wanted this new thing, the gentle white light in which things develop slowly, which allows you, rather than being caught up in time – almost erotically caught up, and always wanting to wring the most intensity out of it, to be in the right place for every moment – to be outside of time, for a while.

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If, in psychological terms, love has made possible the simultaneous existence of many selves, logistically it seemed at first to force a choice between them. I had struggled to feel at home in London because I hated having to choose between different lives. In a small city I had been able to go birdwatching, go to Mass, go to dinner, go to drinks, watch a film, read, run, work, have a job, all in one day, everything a ten-minute walk or cycle from everything else. I could be interested in everything, and to some extent exhaust it. I didn’t see every exhibition or watch every film or know every footpath; but these things were within grasp, and all of them at once. London felt like a bad place for a generalist. And it wasn’t just having to specialise in terms of, say, art vs music vs film, but also ‘dating’ vs ‘having friends’ vs ‘writing’ vs ‘being a Christian’. It was as if you had to choose your ‘thing’ and do and be that, a thing that became your identity. I had baulked at the idea that having a partner would be my identity. (Or, for that matter, going to sex clubs, or whatever.) But love helped me to abandon the idea that you could be everything at once. It also helped me abandon the idea that choosing one thing at a given moment meant a rejection of the other things. If the unearthed selves are welcomed back in, so then are selves that are momentarily set aside not jettisoned and rejected for good.

Just after I first started seeing P., someone asked me if I felt settled in London, and I said that I still felt I was moving to London; that it was a long process that was not yet complete, of which having a lover here (and one in north London into the bargain; I had a longstanding belief that only once I had lived north of the river would I really have moved to London) was only another phase. Half a year later someone I’d not seen for a while asked how I was, and in answer I said I felt I’d finally moved to London. What was the thing that clinched it, he asked, and I was too embarrassed to say it was that it was because I had a boyfriend. Instead, I said that it was because I’d come to see that the problems I’d thought that I would at some point solve were insoluble – that these simply were what it was to live in London. I can’t totally discount the idea that the reason I felt I’d finally got here was that I now had a sense of ownership of an area that wasn’t a cosy inner suburb with rolling hills and Victorian terraces. And all of the other kinds of integration into the external life of London – like, real London – that P., who has a much more energetic social life than I do, brought with him. But chiefly it was through being able to stop fighting the sense that maybe one day I would have it all, that I would solve the problem of London and magically everything would fall into place.

One of the things that surprised me when I first moved to London was how it felt more, not less, ordinary, more, not less, unselfconscious, than other places. In the first week after moving I went to a poetry reading, cycling from south-east London across Tower Bridge just after sunset. At the reading I asked a friend if it got old, the feeling of excitement, the sublime of the metropolis, crossing the Thames at night, and he said that it didn’t. Love has come to feel similar. A lot of things that I previously found extraordinary, hardly likely ever to happen if not outright impossible, have become ordinary, and, as I say, their very ordinariness is itself the surprise; the day-to-day experience is not one of intensity and difficulty, a constant standing outside of oneself looking on, but something calm, a taking for granted, even, of things that I previously took to be remarkable. But at the same time, it doesn’t and – I hope – won’t get old.

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*

Gull on the fields by the marsh turning in the yellow light against the dark clouds, ‘twinkling’. (Or glittering? sparkling?)

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Sobering up from seeing H. In the shower, phrases in my head: tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Savon d’alep.

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I feel sad about the intensity of work that went into the novel at some points. Was rejected yesterday evening by —, which doesn’t surprise me, but I’ve come to want nothing but success for it.

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How to make this book more honest and less pretentious and simply work better?

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Frost on the roof, a lovely moonscape.

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Frost again. Against the pastel trees and bushes the birds – a jay and a woodpigeon which keeps diving for food and then dashing away – stand out. Both in their own pastel tones looking very fine, the jay in particular.

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Some kind of ‘message’ from UC – they have started putting jobs in my journal. I woke up and saw the notification and wanted to write to them to tell them to stop sending these because it would mean I would stop paying attention to their messages.

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Last night dreamt that I was given permission by Fitzcarraldo to say that I was longlisted. Still no word from either agent.

Later: Two minutes after writing this I got an email saying I had been shortlisted – slightly uncanny. Soon after reading the email I had a clear fantasy, nearly a hallucination, of the taste of a particular kind of meat in my mouth, but now I cannot remember what it was. Not bacon. Steak, lamb?

*

The sky is white but brighter than it has been. I began to imagine leaves on the tree. It’s the 20th January – not yet the time to say that this winter hasn’t been that bad, but perhaps, after all, it is the time. I suppose P. is the main reason.

*

Woke in the night to a bright room, outside orange, everything past the garden obscured in fog, through which the light pollution was shining. But now no sign of it and I wonder if it was a dream.

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Dream of having left my old yellow rucksack on a train going north from Leipzig. The sudden freedom of having almost no stuff.

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Dreamt of accidentally ending a voice note to P. with ‘I love you’ and having to redo it.

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Keep hearing but not seeing geese overhead. Wingbeats and calls.

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Hungover. Sun has come out; perhaps I can make my film today after all. Last night walking down the road to get champagne, suddenly it ‘sinking in’, ran all the way to the wine shop.

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Train to Liverpool. Frost in fields melting from field to field, now only in the shadows. I wonder what the people of Watford make of the fact that so many people must see their fields and their houses from the train and this represent something to them that has nothing to do with Watford, but the relief of going North, or the dread.

*

Just crossed the Mersey, low, mudflats visible. Someone at the reading last night said they envied what landscape meant to me. I felt not quite a fraud but a convert.

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Should I leave in 10 mins to go to mass at the Pugin church 25 mins away or go to mass at the church in Wallasey at 7pm, which is more like 45 mins away. These kinds of decisions are why I do not go to Mass.

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Woke up as always explaining things in my head to the DWP. To the job centre staff I mean.

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M. mortified that I saw her outburst as a model; but it was helpful to see that someone could be full of feeling and still themselves, not beyond love.

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Made the mistake of discovering another job to apply to. It’s an addiction!

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Hard to comprehend that the financial insecurity is over, at least for the next few months.

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Last night, light rain as I left P.’s and walked to Dalston, and then on the walk from the bus stop, newly wet ground and blossom on the turn.

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Waiting for an email. And amazing to think that where in the past that feeling, that I might get an email that solves all my problems, brings me simultaneous love, recognition, money – this is now real, it happens, I was even sent a ‘love letter’ from the Dutch press.

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On walk: went to the Thai supermarket. Yellow cat darting about. Yellow catfish in the freezer.

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I think heterosexuality, no, not heterosexuality but the couple – I look at it and say, is this it. Rebetiko in this café suggesting as an alternative a life in intense sensory experience, or whatever.

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Yesterday, edge of Havering, England flags and union jacks, a kestrel in the wind over a flat, low school. And then starling scattering from the treetops from the edge of the wood which bordered the school, the kestrel again, hovering now in the deep blue sky.

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H. last night, asking how to cultivate humility. I said to have such a high opinion of oneself that one could only ever fall short of it.

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Complete gender crisis at the moment about writing and thinking. My inability to understand Hegel makes me less of a man, which, when I force myself to think of actual men, many of whom do not understand Hegel, is not about men per se but some idea of masculinity. H. said this. That masculinity for me was just what was harder. That it was a system of antagonisms, consisting just in the antagonism itself – his attempt to connect back to Hegel.

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Evening. Lovely patter of the woodpecker on the big tree.

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Dreamt of four wooden blocks covered with dead and live moths, moths struggling out of their casings as I looked, and I pressed the blocks together to kill them, smearing the resultant paste off on the edges like one does a peanut butter knife.

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The podcast, afterwards, talking about Stifter’s life, and I didn’t say how reassuring I found the fact that he was a provincial school inspector, for all that I am not one, and his misery, for all that I do not have any.

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Keep having thoughts where I imagine having to teach a child certain things. For example, I have to show them how to wash and keep clean a shallow wound, and thinking of how idiosyncratic my own method is. Really visceral sense last night, watching Akerman’s film about the tall jolly man who won’t leave her apartment, of not wanting to be pregnant.

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Three people surround me, eating very noisily, masking the conversation behind me which, some minutes ago, was about how Germany offered a model in how they had learned from their past.

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Dreamt I saw a “cherubim harrier”.

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Later, after 750 words of review written, remembering that as I tried to fall asleep the owls kept me awake, the hooting frantic and hoarse, as if straining their voices. Was it P. who recently said that obviously Marxists love work, they spend all their time writing books.

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Buzzard already at its post, I hear from the magpies rattling.

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It’s time for an email, from — or from —, come on now.

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I have become over-familiar with the buzzard and find it distracting. Sitting in the tree causing bother to everyone.

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Coach from Cornwall to London. Yellow sun very bright on cornfields in Wiltshire, Berkshire. Amazing mist at the beach, shifting in patches, and the waves cresting more frequently, white lines disappearing backwards. From the sea our little encampment invisible, and the rocks at the sides. Then when we went to the bar immediately the mist began to go and all the relations became clear. No writing, no reflection, for days. It was good. I was glad not to be T., who was reading Dostoyevsky. To be idle and just hold hands with my lover. In London now, Chiswick or near enough. Delicate clouds in the sky with dragged blurred lines.

*

Yesterday reached a point of perfect stasis. 2 hours to tutoring on the bus, 1.5 or more back. Lay on my bed reading the LRB on my phone and every 5 minutes checking my email and whatsapp, then ran out of energy for the LRB and so just looked at my open email app, willing someone to send something.

*

7 or 8 crows in the tree. The garden smells of rotting plums, but also something like lilac.

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Was woken by a wren so loud I thought it was my alarm.

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Just listened to the BBC programme using Iona Opie’s recordings and suddenly remembered the boredom of the playground a child and the hope every day of it being wet play.

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Woke at 6 to rain. Redid alarm until 8.15, by which point the cat was wet and hungry. The poor thing was hiding in the children’s fairy shelter in the garden and ran very fast into the kitchen when I opened the door on spec. Didn’t write but immediately started googling to find a pamphlet about avoiding left-antisemitism from 2018 or thereabouts.

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5.30 on a Friday, the point when I realise that it’s not this week that the money is coming, nor the email that tells me what my plans are. And the freedom of the weekend from email-checking.

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Smashed a glass last night while watering – I saw it fall over and begin to roll and it had never occurred to me that it might not stop, and might, when it landed, smash everywhere.

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QM confirmed I do not have a job next year, which depressed me. I managed to dye E.’s pyjamas pink, just before I got the QM email. So I don’t know if yesterday’s mood of failure was more my domestic failures or academic ones.

*

Housesitting at G.’s, the haze of the dirty windows and the vertical wall of the flats opposite, a whole street of people to watch. Bare grassy area in the middle, playground with a very high fence. I can’t see the seats of the swing, and so can only ever hear it squeaking.

*

Saw G.’s hair clip and suddenly experienced the feeling, hard to describe, of being a 10- or 11-year-old girl, perhaps a little older, Year 7, the intense quasi-erotic pleasure of owning a set of small Claire’s Accessories hair clips.

*

F. says the robinia in the garden may have to be cut down and this has made me want to move out.

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The foxes at night are loud and have complex fights, perhaps also with other animals. I thought they had attacked a cat. Magpies on the ‘lawn’. And the chirrup of the martins. Sycamore rustling.

Later: I don’t usually love foxes but the way this one just trotted delicately across the lawn, like a deer, entranced me.

*

Yesterday, buying pigs cheeks for the meal with N., I was sending her a voice note about discovering they were still attached to the head, and all of a sudden remembered a scene from a dream, in which I was cutting open a live animal, a rabbit or cat, as a form of punishment; it had something in its belly, whether pregnant or a tumour or something it had eaten that I wanted. The scalpel did not cut cleanly and kept snagging. At first it squirmed but then it lay still, accepting its fate, and I felt uneasy. I told myself not to be squeamish, for if I couldn’t stomach the implications of meat eating then I would have to stop eating meat.

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The leaves of the sycamore by the window in the wind, much louder than the rain has yet been.

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The creature was possibly a lamb! In the dream. Why that matters I don’t know.

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Walking through park in Bethnal Green, wind, plastic bags and leaves blown about and then pigeons too, as if blown by the wind, but then I grasped that they were coming together in a flock around a man, who smiled at me and said rice, good rice for them.

*

W[estern] H[ouse] M[artin]s in a field in their hundreds, diving + swirling, like insects.

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‘What do you do if you need a poo in an English country garden’ in my head – desperate for a wee but everywhere a bit exposed.

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Imagine a life without regret, without feeling there is a ‘best’ or ‘right’ way that I am always seeking + missing.

*

At the house meeting F. and H. relayed what the tree surgeon had said about the robinia, and said that we would still have the tall canopy because its child was growing in someone else’s garden behind it. I look out and there it is – seen as if for the first time. But our tree is perfect because it is so bare, so easy to see the birds, who perch happily in its twisted branches.

*

Dreamt the Collins bird app had been updated and made more cutesy and accessible and thus rendered completely unusable.

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Just read some of my notebooks from 2022 and worried they are worse now. Is this because being in love – not the right phrase, really – being in a relationship – not a very nice phrase – forces one to stop making oneself a character.

*

H. was saying brightly and with a touch of hysteria that she was feeling very sentimental in the autumn weather. I feel more untouched by the weather than for a long time. Is this because of P.?

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Spilled a vile peanut butter milk stout I found in N.’s fridge and it got on the keyboard. Nothing affected aside from the backspace key, which is now extremely sticky and hard to press. I immediately see this as in some way – deserved, appropriate etc.

*

Read the end of John Burnside’s memoir and was quite affected by it. Then started reading Helen Garner’s diaries. If she is still in in 2027 people will get something out of the novel. I hope.

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Invitingly lit train sheds and lights like at Center Parcs all along the lines just outside Crewe.

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Walked back from Rainham Marshes the back way, that I would previously have been terrified by, I was rewarded by a barn owl, perched on a fence post a few metres away, which I saw and was so surprised by, its unreality, that it took me a second to grasp what it was, its face more like an illustration than reality. Reminded writing it that I of course have seen a barn owl close up, at the owl campsite in Norfolk. It flew off into the pink and gold light that was coming through from the Thames by the Tilda factory and the huge cylinders. Everything about it was as it was meant to be.

*

Armpit hair plastered upwards damp after the shower reminded me in a repulsive moment of the way the large yellow spiders in the bathroom hold their legs at rest, pressed together in front and behind.

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Characteristic smell of the house, burning garlic in the morning, astringent.

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Remembered that I hadn’t known what to say when I got to the drinks and so tried to sell J. a tea towel.

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Dreamt of a minibus full of babies. I tried to help them on but the bus driver said I didn’t need to. I looked again and could see that they were doing it themselves: one baby, very young, very slowly manoeuvring itself across the passenger seat with tiny spidery hands. P.: ‘You really know how to have a baby dream!’

*

Grey-white day out. Was reminded of how I texted H. to ask if what I write here is ‘alt lit’. ‘Only if you publish it.’

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At P.’s desk. P. asleep. The duvet is spilling out of the duvet cover when I look over at him.

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Two children in Belair Park screaming at crows to go away, over and over. I wondered if they thought they were unlucky. Or rather, I worried that they had grasped that they were unlucky and I had been oblivious.

*

Aeroplanes lit up gold in the sky over Brockwell Park. In the light everything was different, almost flattened; for the first time, coming down the path, I saw Herne Hill, that is, I could see the rise of the hill as I looked over, I could see the church, neither of which I had ever noticed before from there.

I got there just before dusk, and found it was nothing but an empty field and a couple of container-style cabins that had come straight from a construction site – the door of one had been left open, showing a mirror over a sign saying, ‘You are looking at the person responsible for your safety’. There was otherwise a single sad bell tent flapping in the wind, obviously empty of glampers.

As I rounded the corner I also saw a campervan and I was relieved that I wasn’t going to be the only guest. But when someone came out of it, I realised that it must be the warden – he certainly didn’t look like a holidaymaker, at least the sort I’d come to expect to find in a campervan, middle-aged couples, Germans, families with young children. Two other men were hanging around between the temporary buildings. One of these, a slim cocky guy, came up to me. (The third man didn’t talk to me or look at me the whole time I was there; the oldest of the three, he seemed to do nothing but skulk silently in and around the campervan.) ‘Nigel?’ I said, the name of the man I’d been texting about the booking. No, he said, but didn’t introduce himself. He was nonetheless friendly, although I began to worry his smile was more of a smirk or a leer. Have you booked, he asked and I said yes and gave my name and said that I’d paid. He pointed out the cabin with the toilets and showers and said that unfortunately the women’s toilets weren’t working but that there was an individual toilet that was. He also said that the water wasn’t drinking water – all of it was hot, a problem that they were working to solve. He said I could pitch wherever, but suggested I go in the lee of the toilet block as it was getting quite windy.

As we walked towards the suggested pitch I suddenly sensed something unusual at the edge of my vision. I turned to see a small barn owl tethered to a metal hoop on the grass. It was the closest I’ve ever been to a barn owl, and it took me a while to grasp what I was seeing: the delicacy of the colouring and the shape of the face seemed too perfect not to be a model or a drawing or an apparition. I’ve had the same experience more recently, at Rainham, with a wild owl that I came across perched on a fencepost and I stood there, stupidly, for a few seconds, unable to understand it. This owl on the hoop bent its head and took a step to one side, its feathers ruffling in the wind, and I could see that it was real.

I was feeling confused and vaguely threatened by the three men, who did not look much like the people who usually run campsites, and so I found a pitch outside of the horseshoe of construction cabins, behind a petrol lawnmower. The lawnmower had been used at some point recently, certainly, but not regularly, and otherwise it was just a field, a farmer’s field, rough and tussocky underfoot, next to a field of horses that I was told was not part of the site. Aside from the cabins there was absolutely no shelter, no trees, nothing. I decided to shower first, then assess the situation; I was also desperate for a wee.

I went to the individual toilet and had my wee, then tried to flush. It didn’t work. I tried the tap and a tiny trickle came out. I then went to the shower cubicles and got undressed, but the same was the case there. I gave up and washed my feet and socks in the trickle of (cold) water, then went out to tell the men what I’d found. Now only the youngest was around. Ah yeah, he said, sorry, battery’s gone, but someone’s bringing a new one and it will be along in literally five minutes. We chatted briefly about where I had walked from and about the weather. He’s got the right idea, he said, and pointed to a small unfinished shelter in the middle of the three cabins. I looked over and, again taking a moment to understand what I was seeing, made out a second owl, a much larger one, huddled against the corrugated metal wall, with big red eyes that it narrowed at us as we looked over. ‘There’s two!’ I said awkwardly, and the man said proudly that they were both his, rescue owls. In fact, he said, there were twenty-four more coming the next day. He was going to start a sanctuary.

I went back to my tent and momentarily freaked out. There were no other campsites within walking distance; a few miles away there was a fairly expensive hotel. Down the road was a B&B for people with horses and I considered begging them to let me pitch my tent in a paddock. I have stayed on slightly sinister campsites before – I often walk in September, at the end of the season, and have therefore been the only guest a few times now, once, memorably, where a loud but distant party arrived at 11pm and were gone by 7 and I still can’t say that they were real and not some kind of overnight fairy gathering. But this was let’s say the dodgiest campsite I’d ever stayed at. I looked at google reviews and found everyone saying the same things – too expensive for what it was, no drinking water, nowhere to wash up, someone who had been put here as an ‘upgrade’ from another site with the same owner, which they thought bode ill for the whole endeavour. At the same time there had been a little vase of plastic flowers in the toilet, a reassuring detail. I decided to be brave and stick it out, and packed my stuff for the pub. As I left, the youngest man offered me some bottled water, but then came back empty-handed. He reassured me again that the battery was coming in five minutes.

At the pub I had an overpriced meal and a couple of pints, charged my phone, filled my bottle, did my teeth etc. I also looked up the second owl. I’d thought from its tufts it was a long-eared owl, then realised it was too large for that, and the Collins app confirmed that it had to be an eagle owl. An eagle owl! I’d never seen one, only ever heard them, once, bivouacking illicitly in a national park in the south of France. When I got back to the campsite I had a final wee. The toilet still wouldn’t flush.

I slept better than I was expecting; I could hear the men talking around a fire as I lay reading the most soothing book I had with me (Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom). A tawny owl called from a distant hedgerow or copse. I was woken at midnight by light rain and hurried to get in my socks which were pegged to the guy ropes; everything was quiet. In the morning I packed up and set off for the nearest flushing toilet. I passed the youngest man on the way out, the owl man as I had begun to think of him. He asked me if I’d slept well and if his (his!) tawny had woken me – she had been calling from the roof of the cabin next to me. I said I’d heard one but only very faintly. He told me he had just arrived, he had previously lived in York. He said very few places accepted his owls and it was hard to find a job, that the money here was bad but he was happy so long as he was with his owls. The other owls, the twenty-four, were staying at a different sanctuary in York, but were arriving today, as was an aviary. He said he hated that the owls were tied up and that he was just waiting for them to get used to the place then they would be flying free. He told me that when he took them down to the beach to fly them people came and marvelled. He told me that the barn owl had been rescued from someone who had been cruel to her, and that she was a baby. He told me that he’d been part of an eagle owl release scheme with David Attenborough, his hero.

It was raining lightly, as it had been since the night, and I desperately needed a wee and a coffee. But I was also fascinated by this man and wanted to find out more from him – not facts about owls, especially when I knew at least some of the things he was saying couldn’t be true, and for that reason wasn’t sure what of what he said of himself might also be a kind of fabrication or fantasy – but trying to work out his ‘deal’, what sort of person this was, whose life seemed to revolve, at least as he presented it to me, around owls.

I had never felt more of a townie, realising that these rural men were of a type that I’d never really encountered, and not really being sure how to understand them. I couldn’t place their accents – although neither had a Yorkshire accent at least – and wasn’t sure if they were local, or from elsewhere, and what it would mean if they were. Was the campsite a kind of scam? Or more a delusion, a belief that this really was an acceptable offering at an acceptable price? Was this man in on it, or was he another victim of ‘Nigel’s’ – if Nigel even existed? What did he think I believed of what he said? What did I believe? – because at first I had really thought there might be twenty-four owls somewhere in the country, and felt anxious to think of them cooped up together in some kind of ramshackle aviary; it was only much later that I realised that I had seen all of the owls that there were to be seen.

I found it all mysterious, and that mystery was in part a kind of sociological mystery, based on gender and class and the country vs the city. I couldn’t ‘read’ these men; their clothes, their hair, their ruddy faces were unintelligible, I couldn’t translate them into types I recognised from the city. And the owls – the fact that owls were involved raised the whole thing, whatever it was about, to the level of allegory.

At the gastropub–artisanal bakery down the road I asked for gossip about the campsite. The staff all knew about it. Apparently the owner had bought the field and did have a licence, but hadn’t received permission from the council nor the parish and so everyone locally was a bit put out. They’d heard other people complain too, about the water and the general condition of the place. And the warden, the owl man, I asked, what about him? He seemed sweet, at least? Oh him, they said, he’s a menace. Always bringing his owls in here, even though we’ve told him not to. Later that day I received another text from Nigel, asking me to rate the campsite out of 5.

I was reminded of this story, which I’d been wanting to write out or ‘use’ in some way, when reading Rosa Lyster’s piece on the trial of the men who cut down the Hadrian’s Wall sycamore. In it she mentions that the younger of the two, Adam Carruthers, had had two owls in his workshop. So perhaps after all this is a thing – perhaps people who have grown up in the country or who are more in with the birdkeeping scene will be like oh yeah, I know the type, the guy with two owls. Perhaps a little childlike, quick to lie implausibly, brought in on mad projects with older men, oblivious to the reactions or outrage of others. I can’t recommend the campsite but if you’re ever in north Norfolk, look out for an eagle owl being flown on a wide, windswept beach (if indeed that part of the story was true), ‘impressive, fierce-looking, unmistakable’ (Collins).

I came to nursery rhymes through Peter and Iona Opie’s Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955). I was consulting it for a translation, which it didn’t, in the end, help with, but as I read through I was struck by the violence and the sexuality of the rhymes. And also the oddness – the confidence of the strange logic which is asserted so simply and plainly that it appears to speak to a more basic or profound truth, a reality more real than ours.

I was reading Robyn Skyrme’s Candles and Water and, in a piece about Sean Bonney, found this expressed there as an appreciation of Bonney’s poem ‘ACAB: A Nursery Rhyme’:

‘for “I love you” say fuck the police’ is ‘up above the world so high’: the playground injunction of the annihilation of these murderers is precisely the truth of injustice interacting with the overriding truth of a better universe, it is the truth of the cow jumping over the moon, it makes the exact same sense, and somewhere in language, there are schoolkids maintaining that truth.1

So I had been thinking about the nursery rhyme as a poetics, a model for the kind of poetry I wanted to be writing, and also the nursery rhyme as a form with political potential, when Edwina proposed the project. My task for this introduction [I was following Edwina, who had spoken about Wind the Bobbin Up as a work song] is to speak about our process, and one of the very first things we did was to have a go at writing our own nursery rhymes, which is harder than it might look. We did this exquisite corpse-style, each person writing a line and then folding it over, although in fact the previous line had to be visible for the rhyme and metre, so it was only the previous-but-one that was hidden. Here are some of our attempts:

O rise, daughter, stand on your feet
Butcher, butcher, where is your meat?
You’ll never be up if you’re not around
You’ll never get wet if you don’t make a sound.

Eewi keewu beenu wee
Trankl slooshl chipping cree
What do the birds say?
This is what the birds say
Eewi keewu beenu wee.

We have met, in person and online, over several months to share ideas, things we have been reading, images, our work in progress, preoccupations, bobbins and bobbin-like things, some of which we have brought today – Hannah Machover, for instance, has brought lace bobbins which she had painted, and Charlotte Geater lace bobbins which she has spangled, also the starting point of her poem for the pamphlet. Those ideas have also included John Wayne Bobbitt, whose penis was cut off in the late 1980s – this was Mark Waldron – and the French children’s song, ‘Ah ! vous dirai-je maman’, whose tune is used in Twinkle twinkle, Baa baa black sheep, etc., which Hugh Foley brought along. Hugh can’t be here today but I’ve mounted the song on a cardboard bobbin:

We all also each drew our own bobbins, which are scattered anonymously throughout the pamphlet – a bit like a primary school tea towel, someone said, and so we have also made a tea towel with the bobbin drawings on, which haven’t yet arrived, but which are available to pre-order for Christmas here.

So throughout, we have been working with a common source, but also working with and building on each other, and bringing in other sources – not to be too neat about it, but thinking, perhaps, of the bobbin as a structure on which various stuff can be wound and re-wound, a form that can hold whatever it is that needs to be kept in one place to be used in creating something else, that keeps things in order for a while and stops them getting tangled.

With this last part, I was thinking in particular of my own poems for the pamphlet, one of which tried to work through (‘untangle’) something of what I wrote about last time. At the launch I didn’t read that one, but the other poem, more celebratory, which is about my friend’s daughter at 3 months, and a second, seasonal, poem, not in the pamphlet, that I’ve included below.

Sitting in a circle with the audience we read from our seats (in an order that was more lace-like than the circular movement of a wound bobbin, and for that reason perhaps a bit over-complicated): Charlotte Geater read part of ‘Spangling My Bobbins’ and another poem based on nonsense, Mark Waldron read – from memory – his poem ‘Clap Clap Clap’, Emilia Weber read her villanelle ‘We All Fall Down’ and later a poem by Holly Pester, Grace Connolly Linden read her poem ‘fiat experimentum in corpore vili’, Aisha Farr read her poem which is part-image, based on the similarity between bobbins and the letter I, Edwina read a new poem and her nursery rhymes from the pamphlet (which demonstrate that it is possible to write your own!); we played a recording of Angela Shackel reading her poem ‘Open, Shut Them’ with the help of her son Orlo, Nicola Thomas read parts of her poem, ‘One Finger One Thumb’, about the constant motion of early parenthood and the mechanisation of baby-rocking, Hannah Machover read a torchon (a form of sestina, whose name comes from a form of lace-making) and Frith Taylor read her untitled poem from the pamphlet that draws on Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus, in which children learn to speak correctly through imitating animal (and other) sounds. There are also poems in the pamphlet by Hugh Foley and Vicky Sparrow, who couldn’t be there to read them.

We then invited everyone to share their own nursery rhymes and songs and prompts, which included a rude version of ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be?’ (‘First one in was fat lady Humphreys / Squeezed herself down and she said it’s quite comfy / But when she was through she could not get her bum free’) and a lace-telling song from a radio ballad by Jackie Oates. I used it as an opportunity to read a rhyme that one of the children interviewed by Iona Opie recites, from this Radio 3 programme:

tell tale tit
your tongue will split
and all the little birds
will have a little bit

If it had not been a bit indecent to take up too much time as one of the organisers, I would also have talked about how in that programme a child describes a game called ‘Spotlight’ in what seemed to me an extremely pregnant way:

you just get out of the light: you go from one dark place to the next dark place; you can play Spotlight all on your own.

and possibly also about how last summer I went for a long walk and the whole week I couldn’t stop hearing in my head the playground song, ‘What do you do if you need a poo / In an English country garden?’ As I passed through the room after the readings, I overheard people talking about different names for the game ‘tag/tig/it’ – which in Nottingham was always called ‘dobby’.

The pamphlet was printed by earthbound press and comes with a letterpress bookmark printed by Nicola Thomas. It is available here.

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For P.E., Advent 2024

what to my mouth
is a mince pie
after our half-natural
morning; and what
is this bright sun
after the dark situation?
yes: bright sun
after the dark situation

A year ago I was going to write here about a book, What Are Children For?, by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. The book deals with the arguments people might make for or against having children, addressing itself to the ambivalent and undecided, and ultimately suggests that these arguments are beside the point. It tries to offer a kind of companionship to those who aren’t sure, showing them they are not alone in finding it hard to decide – and also makes this part of its argument, that this is not a decision that is made alone, but in collaboration with others.

I was not going to write about any of this, however, but instead focus on the uncanny way that they appeared to be hiding their actual position throughout, and how this got picked up on in reviews, which called them crypto-conservative and pro-natalist, and how they responded with bafflement, because it had all been in good faith and they believed themselves to be on the left. All of this seemed a rehashing on a slightly larger scale of a previous accusation of crypto-conservatism in The Point, the magazine they are both involved with, which I’d wanted to write about for a long time, because I’d come to believe that people in Chicago didn’t believe in the idea that language could do anything other than say straightforwardly what it meant, which was identical with what its author had meant. From this position, the accusation of being crypto-anything made no sense: the authors had stated their intentions and their wider political commitments, and there was nothing else to see, no way that style or language or context might be betraying them unawares. (I understood the accusation against the book, but thought it was uncharitable to the point of paranoia – which is not to say that I thought the book was good.) I was going to deal with the actual content of the book in a brief aside at the end.

I didn’t write the piece for a few reasons. The argument was a bit above my pay grade. I had to find work, or at least money, and reading literary theory felt an indulgence when there were countless possible jobs to apply for. But perhaps most importantly, the subject of the aside itself had begun to play an outsized, and constantly developing, role in my life, and I no longer felt able to write about it with the distance I had planned. One of my closest friends was pregnant. Another close friend, who is also an ex, was going to have a second child. I found out I was going to be an uncle. And, for more or less the first time, I had to frame my position about children to another person in terms of my desires. The fact that I didn’t have children was not just something that had happened, but a kind of decision, in that other decisions I had made were implicitly, and perhaps unconsciously, also decisions not to have children, even if just about prioritising meaningful work or intellectual projects over making money and having a stable job and housing. Other people, who did hope to have children, had chosen similar paths to me, and that had previously made my decisions seem unremarkable; but now the differences were becoming more apparent, and I had to avow them.

The problem with Berg and Wiseman’s book, as I saw it, was that it took – apparently as read – a question for its framing that seemed very alien to me, and to my understanding of how my friends saw things. The central question in the book was not really about deciding whether or not to have children; it was about deciding whether or not you wanted to have them. And this was presented almost as a question of identity: am I the sort of person who wants children, or not? As it happens, the authors eventually argue against this framing. But I felt that nobody I was close to saw it in these terms at all. That’s not to say that the idea of parenthood didn’t elicit strong feelings around identity. It’s just that the deliberation and self-reflection were downstream of an existing set of feelings and instincts. There was nothing to find out, just practical problems to solve or things to come to terms with. I can see that this is probably to do with the people I choose to be close to, and perhaps more importantly, the ones who talked about it. But I’d never heard anyone express anything like the idea that the book opens with, the desperate wish for clarity on whether or not one wanted children. My sense was that they either wanted them, and were in some way doing something about it, or else they didn’t, and were doing something about that, whether by trying out being a nun or working out how to set up a commune. If there was difficulty, or anxiety, fear, uncertainty, it was mostly to do with concrete situations, or lay in some kind of mismatch, whether between two people in a couple, or a person or couple and their circumstances, or, like me, between what they believed and what they wanted.

I didn’t think I wanted children. But I also didn’t think that children were the kind of thing that you wanted or didn’t. They were something you were in a position to have, or weren’t, or perhaps more accurately, they were something you were up for – up to – or weren’t. If you weren’t, there were other things you could do, and should do, to live in a way that bound yourself to others. The idea came partly through Catholicism, but was articulated most forcefully by non-Catholic leftist friends. Having children was a form of resistance towards (neo)liberal ideas of individualism and choice, an impoverished vision of freedom as consumption. It was also an embrace of a properly human life – was perhaps the central human experience, to reject which was a rejection of one’s own humanity.

I had never encountered any overt pressure to have children from anyone – society, family, friends – only ever the opposite. I think that a lot of people of my age and class and social worlds have had a similar experience, in which the norm is that you won’t, or won’t until later, or won’t until you are in the kind of material situation many people my age will probably never be in. I’m pretty sure that if I did have a baby right now, many people would see me as something like a teenage parent – irresponsible, wilful, improvident. And so this attitude appeared to me the novel, the countercultural one, the attitude in which you did have children, because that’s what humans do.

But at the same time I couldn’t imagine having children, and I’d made sure I wasn’t in a position to have them. Since my late 20s, I had been basically single, and my life revolved around work, friendships and intense activity undertaken alone. I had thought a lot about children, and about how I might live in a way that involved them, or involved other kinds of care and dependency. I liked spending time with my friends’ children, whose ways of being I found fascinating and of an intensity that was easy to connect to, but also a bit exhausting. I sometimes imagined becoming a stepparent, which seemed, while obviously difficult, to involve a form of difficulty I felt more able to deal with; similarly, I sometimes imagined myself as co-parent to a child a notional female partner might have. But becoming pregnant, being a ‘mother’, was something I only ever imagined as a kind of disaster.

So I could see that on some level there was a kind of difference in experience between me and the friends who had plans for children – a difference that was psychological but almost physiological in some cases, a friend memorably once saying that her broodiness was a physical feeling, like hunger or needing a wee – but that was not a kind of heuristic. I took comfort in it nonetheless, and was also relieved that I didn’t have to experience the kinds of disappointment, perhaps even a sense of cosmic incorrectness, that attended this feeling when, for whatever reason, it was frustrated. But it seemed clear that the difference was not about some kind of neutral preference, and my feelings or lack of feelings towards having children were not isolated from other aspects of my psychological life. To identify with it, as if that were the end of that – to tick the box saying ‘don’t want kids’ – would be a rejection of all of my other commitments.

The reason the question became outsized about a year ago was all of the things I mention above, then two more. The first was that, when I was 21, someone told me that they thought I would have a child when I was 22 or 37. The numbers were not chosen at random – they were the ages of his father and mother respectively when they had had him – but essentially they were arbitrary ages signifying ‘younger than usual’ and ‘older than usual’; nonetheless, I remembered them. By coincidence my father was 37 when he had me. And so, since I was 21, this age had taken on a kind of private meaning, and, in the context of my friends’ pregnancies and children and the greater openness of people in their mid- to late-30s to talking about their hopes and anxieties about children, became a subterranean point around which my own feelings began to coalesce, as if it truly were now or never. Then, around my 37^th birthday, I fell in love, something I’d begun to think wasn’t possible.

The reasons I had thought it wasn’t possible were the same as the ones that meant I didn’t think I would have children. I found this very movingly expressed in Hannah Black’s recent essay on motherhood, ‘Mother, Maybe’, in a way that made very painfully clear to me that on some level I am right in my diagnosis of my problem. She writes of falling in love while pregnant:

It had not occurred to me that one thing I had not been brave enough to do—have a child—could relate to another thing I had not been brave enough to do fully—have a sustained intimate relationship in which I allowed myself to be made uncomfortable, to be changed, by my desire for the relationship’s survival.

Now I had to contend with the idea that it might work the other way around, too.

I recently spent a weekend with my friends and their baby, and was forcefully made aware of how unpleasant I found the idea that anyone had ever paid as much attention to me and my needs and my passing feelings as all of us did towards this child. I’ve been told that this has changed since we were little, that children are more attended to now than they were then. But even so, the child becomes a focus – of plans and problem-solving and frustration – that I found it painful to imagine I had ever been, and I found it insane to imagine wanting to force another new person into that position. By the same token, the idea of bringing someone into being for whom I would be psychically present for the rest of their life is intolerable. Hannah Black writes, ‘The reality of my daughter is beyond my wildest dreams and dominates every mundane detail of my life. Dumbly, like water proud of being wet or a bird that thinks it invented flight, I am amazed that I am her mother.’ Or, more simply, Helen Garner, of her daughter: ‘Fact: I love her more than anyone in the world.’ I find it horrifying and a bit disgusting to imagine either loving someone that much, or ever having been loved that much, and can only hope that I wasn’t. I had panicked slightly about that weekend, because it was when I was meant to be finishing my novel, and I couldn’t imagine being able to do it around a child. I had actually been hoping to be completely alone, but at least with friends, with adults, you can say ‘look, I need to work’, and in most cases they understand. With a baby, it’s not just that you can’t say to them ‘look, I need to work’ and expect to be understood; it’s that they show up the need to be working as the escape from relation it always was.

*

All the same, I have found it interesting that, of people who have become parents, it is primarily the partners who haven’t given birth who recommend it, and it is only women who have said to me that it’s not for everyone: ‘it’s not for everyone’, two people have said exactly the same thing in the same words, nearly a decade apart, one more generally, the other with specific reference to me. And as I say it is specifically motherhood that I am afraid of – not just the body horror around pregnancy, although perhaps that too, but the particular intensities and kinds of hate and love that mothers, birthing parents, seem to feel, and people feel towards the person who bore them and fed them. For some, motherhood is mortality. For me it’s dependency, which is presumably another aspect of the same thing, but feels different – something like the way that I’m not afraid of spiders themselves, but of accidentally wounding a spider that is on my body, rendering it incapable of getting away, binding it to me. I care much less about wanting to be killed and supplanted as a figure of authority, indeed often want to be.

I know, and hate, the fact that the whole matter is different for those who can become pregnant, and those who can make someone else pregnant – that, with cis male friends, I am speaking across a divide. For instance, for all that I find it hard to imagine myself a parent, I have sometimes wished that there could be something of the done deal about it. But this is much harder for those who can be pregnant, at least when you have access to contraception and abortion. I was always shocked to find that cis men I knew had slept with new partners, women, without a condom, had had one night stands where they had done this, even. I dream constantly about having to look after a baby I hadn’t known was mine. But at least all this – like the fantasy of falling in love with someone who already had a child – removes the question of having to decide, and decide to do something that sounds awful and nearly impossible, especially in the absence of the feeling of biological imperative that other people I know have felt. Black talks of how she ‘remained in the fog of my indecision for so long, even weeks into the pregnancy, that I had to arrive at the decision multiple times after it was made’. This is not an experience a male parent can have.

Sometimes I feel that there are kinds of willed delusion that attend on parenthood, things people say they hadn’t known or expected in advance, that sound totally mad to me, because they are things that I think about all the time, and feel I have never not known about. This is also how it sometimes feels when the same person can appear to be nearly losing it and then the next day, or the next year, say how much they love having a child – although here I know that it’s me who doesn’t understand. But it does seem to me to be running a huge risk, that is not just an excuse or a pretext, to enter into something so hard when you hate the idea of it so much. That is, I’m afraid, at least as much as anything else, of ruining several people’s lives; the fear of having a child is about being bound to someone else in love and also in resentment and hate and coldness and neglect. This sounds like a way of making a cowardly decision palatable for myself – to imagine that I am protecting others from having to be hurt by me – but I understand that as in itself cowardly, a unilateral withdrawing of trust, a lack of respect. But whatever the case, the fact of actively having to decide makes the risk very low.

It is in this context that I was struck by something Helen Garner wrote in her diaries, ‘having had a child when I did has been one of the major strokes of good fortune in my life.’ I recognised it as something I had, when I was younger, 21 even, thought I might later think. I felt a flash of future regret, a new anxious fantasy unlocked. When my friend repeated the phrase ‘you only live once’ to me as a reason to have children, I knew what he meant, but only in this post hoc form, Garner’s gratitude towards earlier good luck, could I really respond to it, because this was something, I realised, that I already couldn’t say, not really.

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There came a point this year when I stopped being preoccupied the question of whether I would ever change to such an extent that I could accept the mutual dependence that parenthood involved, and started thinking instead that it was more about accepting the feeling of guilt that came from the knowledge I would never change that much, at least not ‘in time’. I had thought that meeting my friend’s baby would somehow decide the matter for me, that I would feel something around her that gave me a clear sign one way or another. Instead, I felt nothing but the same intellectual stuff I always have felt around children. I was fascinated and a bit repelled by how alien a newborn baby can be, and fascinated and a bit repelled at my indifference towards her as the sort of being I could also have an intense relation to, if I chose to. A few months later I cat-sat for a friend with older children, which I again privately thought of as a chance to decide the matter, because I knew that this was a house that I could imagine myself living in, and so it would be a chance to try on the material surroundings of this other life for a couple of weeks, to visualise a future with children. What happened instead was that I felt all the more fiercely protective over a life alone, where I could keep my phone on a different floor to my work and concentrate for hours on end without having to interact with anyone. I spent much of the time I was there imagining breaking up with my boyfriend in order to dedicate myself entirely to work.

That month I read Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, and recognised in the formal gesture of the narrator making decisions through tossing coins the same demands I was making of these external situations, in which they would ‘decide’ for me. And the decision I was asking them to make was not unlike the one I had previously – in my planned essay on Berg and Wiseman – disavowed as a decision at all, because I was not deciding whether or not to have children in the here and now, but something much more vague and essentially beside the point, and really what I wanted was some external presence to excuse my fears of dependence and loss of self and let me off the hook.

In Black’s essay – which is basically the reason for writing this piece, although it’s also nearly my 38^thbirthday, when the question will be definitively be removed from the realm of superstition – she also questions whether this thing we see as a decision should be seen as such at all:

Having a child was the only decision that I really treated as one, that I struggled with consciously. In retrospect this laborious process seems absurd. Did I think I was conceiving a concept? My daughter is real and herself.

She talks of indecision as ‘a subby tendency, a refusal of sovereignty over your own life, but like submissive desire the goal is to get what you want without asking’. What the essay dramatises is the opposite of how I feel – I need to be forced to do what I don’t want, because I know that by myself I will never choose it. But what I liked about it was the way that she shows up the idea of choosing between two paths as an illusion, because this way of seeing it is a way of not having to choose, of keeping alive the other path as a possibility, both now and in the future.

Regret hallucinates a bridge between what does and does not happen, an anchor securing the unlived life to the lived one. The regret I experienced after my earlier abortion stemmed not only from having made what I thought was a wrong decision, but from my refusal to acknowledge the decision’s total reality. The regret allowed me to live two lives, the life of reality, in which I was not a mother, and the life of regret, in which the baby was still at stake, still an open question and, in a way, I was its mother.

Now, I envy the kinds of experiences that my friends have, in childbirth, in having children – not the experiences themselves, necessarily, but the novelty of it: I am greedy for all of the experiences life has to offer. And the imagined future regret that I felt on reading Garner’s diaries would be something like that, too, a retrospective envy or greed for more. Heti’s narrator, in her concluding chapter, reaches a point of realising that she doesn’t ‘have to live every possible life’, which in this case tells against motherhood rather than for it. I can as little live through worrying I might abandon my child as I can through worrying I might regret not having one. I’ve not in fact regretted any of the major decisions in my life so far – which, I’ve discovered, is not true of everyone I did a PhD with – if this is the first, whatever it is that happens, then that will itself be a novel experience.

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The reprieve over the summer came partly from reading Motherhood, and finding that the narrator’s preoccupation dissolves when she goes on antidepressants – and that, by the book’s end, it is shown to be bound up with being the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. This made my own preoccupation seem suddenly groundless. I felt free for the first time in months to be absorbed in other questions, ones that seemed more productive and better aligned with how I saw myself, in terms of gender in particular.

But now it’s a few months later, things I am reading draw me back to the old question, or perhaps because it’s my birthday, and that there are new – newer! – babies around me, and I see myself treating my feelings towards them as something to interpret. And so I thought, fine, I will write the piece after all, but properly, not hiding behind discussions of language and politics (or indeed using the promotion of another poetry pamphlet as a pretext, which is what I was initially going to do here but was persuaded otherwise), even though it’s not something I want to admit I think about.

For a lot of this year I’ve wondered what it was that has kept me from writing. I was thinking of writing a piece about love, and still might, which I have often thought of as one of the main culprits. It would be too easy to say that it was in fact this piece that was the block, but this was nonetheless the main thing that I felt I was ‘not writing’ – both specifically, in terms of the essay on intention that I’d planned, and more generally: the thing that I wanted to think through but was ashamed to, or afraid of. Having written it, it’s hard to remember what it was that I feared.

Perhaps most of the examples of this, what Black calls ‘minor literature’, are written from the other side of the done deal, whether the decision was for or against. But the conclusions are the same either way. Everything is already a done deal: there is no other life that is being held open for you. As my friend says, ‘you only live once.’ Every day you make countless decisions, all irrevocable. And it’s that that’s your life, not the other thing, in the past or future. And, at the same time, nothing is a done deal: all commitments, all forms of love, are made up not of something that was decided once, but is decided every day, over and over. The decision to have children is not made in the abstract, but within a specific context, and in relation. You don’t know what will happen, next month, next year. You also don’t know how much you will change, and in what ways, though probably more than you would think, and less than you might hope.

Whether these ideas strike you as profound or obvious depends on which decision they are being written from, at least in my experience, although also perhaps on how clearly and beautifully they are phrased. Certainly I was more struck by Heti’s book than Berg and Wiseman’s, because it felt novel to hear ideas that I usually encountered as reasons for having children used in a description of life without them. Here they are, from neither decision, this side of the done deal. I thought that writing at length about this might somehow – what – make me a mother? Or perhaps even the opposite, commit me to my fears as a kind of identity. But it turns out that neither of these are true, at least for now.

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I have been wanting to write about Tom’s book since early this year, but his took longer to reach a stage where everyone was happy with it than mine, and I’ve only had a copy of the final version since September. But the main problem was that I had had the idea to write about it alongside the work of Chantal Akerman, and this became a kind of block to writing about it at all. Specifically, I wanted to write about News from Home, Akerman’s film in which she reads out the letters she was sent by her mother when she was in New York at 21 over a series of shots of New York taken on a later visit, a film that I would previously not have seen as having anything to do with the Holocaust, but having watched it for the first time just after having submitting my manuscript, which is full of translations of letters from, among others, parents to their children abroad, asking them, as Akerman’s mother does, if they received the money and presents they had sent, asking them to write more often, filling in the details of family ailments etc., came to seem a film infused with that specific history of letter-writing.1

The letters from the archive that seemed most like those from Akerman’s mother were written by a woman in Berlin, Else Lubranczyk, to her daughter Helga, in England, and it is these that Tom’s book, Klutz, revolves around – but on top of that, he includes in it emails written to him by his mother when he was in New York, also at 21:

Try to get a restaurant job before you’re desperate for cash and then it will be less pressured.

Many of which have almost uncanny overlaps to News from Home:

I was glad not to have watched the film until after the residency, because, formally speaking, this was what I had wanted to do, this dislocated overlaying of correspondence and place and language (there are two versions of the film, one in French which now has English subtitles, one where Akerman reads out the letters in an English translation), and it would have been too powerful a model. Reading Tom’s book now, though, I see another question the film raises, about the value of reenactment: Tom worries that a performance of the Lubranczyk letters, in period costume but with markedly English, local, accents, by a company of young people who are not Jewish, is inappropriate somehow, then in an imagined conversation with the performance theorist Rebecca Schneider wonders if it’s not rather the case that these kinds of reenactment are a challenge to the dominance of the archive. Akerman’s film in its dislocations offered a kind of reenactment of the letters, but also a reply, in the daughter’s voice, to the letters; a suggestion that the city was indifferent to the letters, had moved on, was something new, and also a vision of the city as a mythic location, outside of time, to which such letters would always be sent. At least, this is how I read it, thinking of one of the starting points of my book, the beginning of Anna Seghers’s Transit, where Marseille, the New York of Europe (?), takes on a similar role.

To write the post about Tom’s book I decided I would have to watch more of Akerman’s films, which was at first not hard, because there was a season exactly then at the BFI. The email arrived announcing it the day that I submitted my revised manuscript and was feeling intellectually at a loose end – which was around the time that my new lover told me that she was his favourite director, coincidences which, as Tom has it in Klutz, ‘gave direction’. (And on coincidences: at one point I was cat-sitting and the new lover, P, was over, for only the second or third time; as he was leaving, the cat ran out into the corridor, and I ran out after it – without phone, keys, shoes, anything – and the door slammed behind me. We discovered, through looking through mutual friends on Instagram, that the only person who connected me, him, and the cat’s owner, was Tom – whom I called on P’s phone and who then called the cat’s owner’s boyfriend, who didn’t answer at first because he was driving with the cat’s owner to his mother’s. The situation was sorted soon, after perhaps half an hour of sitting in the narrow corridor trying to prevent the cat from straying upstairs; later that day I saw on Instagram that the reason they had been driving to see his mother was because they had just got engaged.)

After watching some films at the BFI, I borrowed what I could on DVD from the library at the university I was working at, and when I’d exhausted that collection and BFI Player and Box of Broadcasts, I started going to UCL library, which has everything or pretty much, but only on Blu-ray, and I don’t have a Blu-ray player, and so to watch them I had to sit under the stairs in the modern languages section, which I did at first during revision period, with the library full of murmuring young people with headphones, and then, some months later, in the emptiness of late summer. I had found out my contract wasn’t going to be renewed and I knew that my UCL library membership would therefore lapse by the end of August; it turned out, when I got to the library, that it lapsed that day, and so I settled in for a marathon, spending 7 hours there watching as many of the remaining films as possible before security gently kicked me out. By this point I had no real sense of what I wanted to say about Akerman or what she had to do with Tom’s book, although Demain on déménage, with its physical comedy and obsession with flats and houses and the Holocaust diary found in the wardrobe all seemed to have something to do with it – and in general, here and in other films, the clowning that comes out in Tom’s book’s title, about which he expresses his ambivalence in the book, and in his self-dramatisation as narrator as a person ‘stumbling towards something and not getting there’. The other week I picked up a book at a book fair whose jacket mentioned Akerman (by a press that I now find has published writing by Tom) and I told its author this story, a truncated version of it at least, and promised to buy the book, but then ended up meeting a friend outside and remembering that I had to stop spending so much money on books. Something in me right now is saying that if I had read that book, I would be writing a better piece.

I include these stories as a kind of homage to Tom and Klutz – in its willingness to describe processes and failures, and in its structuring around coincidence. He discovered early on in the residency that the Lubranczyks had lived very close to where his own grandmother had lived in Berlin, but where both she and her parents had managed to leave for England, Else had not. This non-coincidence – which in some sense is the defining feature of all post-Holocaust writing – is what drives the book, for which its many other coincidences – Tom discovering his grandfather’s name in a book I was reading; Tom seeing that Helga Lubranczyk had lived in an address near his childhood home in London – serve as a contrasting frame. The letters were the first collection he was presented with, and the book goes with the flow of serendipity while also pushing against the easiness of it: the arbitrariness of coincidence, the way meaning is made from it wilfully on the part of the experiencer is part of the book’s story.

Tom and I worked side by side during the residency; we timed our visits to the archive to each other’s and as well as these meetings in person, we met every week on Zoom with Andrew, who was then leading the programme, for a reading group that became a crit group, but was also full of gossip and complaint and the expression of anxieties around the project. In some quite literal ways Tom’s book tells the same story as mine: he describes seeing me in the archive (which he describes, wonderfully, as ‘constipated’), looking focused, when he was panicking and not sure yet what he was going to write, and in mine I describe him in the archive – but what I don’t say is that at that point I was hungover and bored and frustrated, and if I looked focused it was because I realised I was done, I had read enough, I could absorb no more, I needed to leave and just get on with it, and I kept looking over at him, still open, still willing to take on new ideas, and was envious, as I was of his soft black jumper and gold chain, which I was then told had once held a Star of David, now lost, and I worried that what I had envied was his Jewishness. But Klutz is all about not feeling Jewish enough, and also about coming to feel more Jewish, and not being sure if it was because of the residency or because of witnessing the destruction of Gaza.

Where my book tries to make a virtue of obliqueness, Tom’s names everything, brings everything to the surface, discussing frankly the ‘amount of sheer projection’ that the residency involved. The book ends with Tom going to find his great-great-grandparents’ grave in Berlin, a semi-comical set-piece that, at its mid-point, opens out onto an address that is something like a letter to these relatives who died in the 1910s. Where the archive has previously become a kind of ‘burden’, as he puts it, the past intruding, like a ‘Stolperstein’, on the present, here the present tries to make itself known the past, who will never have, or get, to mourn it. It’s an astonishing moment that I don’t want to say more about, in part because its power lies in the surprise of its surefootedness in a book structured around awkwardness and uncertainty.

I’m looking forward to talking about all of this and more with Tom and Rebecca on Thursday. Klutz is available to buy from the Centre’s webshop, here, and Tom is talking about it in an online lecture for the IZK Institute for Contemporary Art in Graz on the 19^th too.

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I met Hugh just over ten years ago; I was visiting from Berlin where I felt culturally out of step with everyone around me, and I had been following from afar the contemporary poetry reading group he had set up, reading the badly scanned selections he emailed around of Michael Robbins, Rachael Allen, Sam Riviere – I had even planned this trip back to the UK around one of the sessions, I think on Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade. One of the first memories I have of our friendship is his sending me a pamphlet draft and me sending it back covered in comments. The email archive says that this was more like six months into the friendship, so exactly ten years ago this week. Revisiting the draft and the comments now, I see that little has changed. His first drafts are full of typos and odd punctuation that I put effort into making sense of as something intended. I feel on some fundamental level that me and Hugh see the world differently and believe that poetry is and does different things. I think that some of his lines or whole poems are too private or oblique. And I also think that there are lines and phrases that are some of the most perfect ever written, that, in their beauty and clarity, ought to seem as if they come from some other realm, and yet always recognisably belong to the whole poem and poet – they have, as Donald Davie said in a slightly different, but in the end relevant context, ‘the reek of the human’.

The pamphlet is called Recent Poems, and includes a selection from his sequence No Monument from 2020, which most explicitly reckons with the private and the lyrical in terms of the public and the historical, and then a selection of poems written since he moved to York three years ago, many of which are about or addressed to his young daughter. If you can’t make the launch, the book is up on the Fair Organ webshop, and available in a few bookshops – East Bristol Books, Burley Fisher, London Review Bookshop, Good Press. The first person to read the collection who wasn’t me or Grace called it ‘touching, rueful, flamboyantly literary’, which I was pleased with, partly because I was glad to have my own reaction confirmed. I cannot wait for the reading, where I will mostly try to hide behind the pamphlet table. It would be lovely to see you there!

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When I arrived to install I was struck immediately by the space, the first floor of a former textile mill, which I had only seen in photos and as a mock-up. It was huge, and lovely, simultaneously austere and busy: tall windows, the light changing across the day and with the weather, a few of which had been blacked out with considerable effort to allow for projections; a rough, uneven wooden floor, bare brick, white pillars, an old loom. Light, sound, texture, and a very insistent sense of its own former purpose, its identity, as part of a geographically specific history, sat alongside and in some ways intruded, I think to the disquiet of some of the artists, on the works.

Others fought back, working against the space, particularly Ariane Schick, who cut and laid down a large round golden yellow carpet in defiance of the layout demanded by the pillars, as part of her installation, book and animation, Manny:

Holocaust Centre North’s tagline is ‘a global history through local stories’ and its archive focuses on the collections of survivors and refugees who settled in the North of England – several of whom were involved in the textile industry – and the venue illustrated this approach well, as it did the brief of the residency programme, which invited participants to explore how the past informed present actions, and to work with aspects of the centre’s collections that had present relevance. When I got to Sunny Bank Mills I was a little afraid that the works would look lost in the space, but I thought we filled it nicely; that some of that filling was harmonious – Hannah Machover’s display table of etchings, for instance, which looked as though it had been left there in the early twentieth century – and other parts involved small tussles for dominance, was all to the good.

The second thing that struck me when I got there was the seven drawings of Chebo Roitter Pavez laid out across the rough wooden floor ready to be hung, coloured pastel on large sheets of black paper – visible here behind Hannah’s work in the photo above. The works combined snippets from the testimony of survivors with motifs from medieval Jewish manuscripts in rich colours and gold:

Chebo was in the third year of the residency and I’d neither met him nor seen anything of his work, and so it came as a kind of shock. For the first time I saw how much my idea of what this kind of work looked like – work specifically about the Holocaust, but perhaps more generally about atrocity, historical or present – had been limited to particular conceptual and aesthetic modes: fragments, ruins, visible breaks and gaps; austerity, modesty, restraint, whites and blacks; silence, an emphasis on the unspeakable; fidelity and authenticity of reproduction; intellectualism. That’s not what all of the work in the exhibition looked like or appealed to by any means, but it was only on seeing the colours and the gold, the excess, the polyphony and richness of Chebo’s drawings that I was able to understand that I hadn’t before known that that was possible. It’s not even that I thought they were good, exactly, although it’s certainly not that I thought they were bad – they were too novel, to me, for me to begin to evaluate them in those terms. What struck me was the challenge that this novelty posed to me, a whole way of making art that I hadn’t known about and wouldn’t have dared to do.

My contribution to the exhibition was a series of nine of the two hundred and something letter-excerpts translated in the book, displayed as vinyl text on the windows. In the book I chose and translated parts of the letters that were about the business of letter-writing – people thanking people for letters and parcels, people commenting on how long they had taken to arrive, expressing relief to get news, apologising for taking a long time to reply. The nine here were those which began ‘we were glad (or delighted, pleased, etc.) to get/receive/hear from…’.

I wanted it to be similar enough to the book that I wasn’t muscling in on the visual artists’ territory, but also a translation of the book into a different mode, and perhaps also to make clear to myself what I thought I was doing with the book more generally. At the opening I suddenly began to worry that people would only read one part of the book, which I had conceived as a whole, each part working against, or altered by, the others. I wanted the letters to be anonymous, not tied to specific histories, and I wanted to let the sense of an unfolding story come to the surface while frustrating the desire to follow any given arc to its end. But I also included short biographies of the writers and recipients of the letters at the end of the book. I wanted the letters to be repetitive, boring, unsensational, but knew that there was no way of keeping out what people already knew. I wanted not to be present, but knew that that was a fiction – but also knew that the fiction was a necessary one. The essay, or ‘notes’, at the end recorded some of the experience of the residency, my aims, my feelings of ambivalence and so on – that is, noted this presence; but I hoped that all that had gone before would not be marked in that way, would be clear and simple.

The idea for the installation had been that visitors would encounter the letters as they walked between the other works; I’d initially thought about putting them on the white pillars in the centre of the space. The curator, Paula Kolar, helped me make it work, doing trial versions and checking font sizes for viability and legibility; she also noted that the text wasn’t always visible against the high bank of trees outside to the west. It was only when I got there and was choosing which panes to use that I realised that this was a good thing – I had wanted the letters to become suddenly and surprisingly visible, and the setting meant that only at particular angles was the text legible at all.

Their appearance also changed considerably with the weather and as the sun moved around the building, fading slowly into the late dusk of the opening. The year before, I had, on my second trip to the archive, decided on a project about the weather; I ended up abandoning it a couple of months later and turning to this one, but I was glad that some of those ideas (which I also picked up in the notes, particularly in a discussion of Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War, about aerial images of the Auschwitz compounds taken by the Allies on a rare day without cloud cover) were once again part of the work. While one of the central ideas of the book and project was ordinary uses of language and ‘phatic’ language, language that communicates feeling through its existence and its following of formulae and not through its semantic content, I was also very interested in the ideas of temporal dislocation and delay that came up so often in the letters, which was partly a feature of the medium and partly a result of war-time logistics – things took long enough to arrive, if they ever did, but even longer if you made your letter in some way hard for the censor to read, through bad or elaborate handwriting or by writing in a language that wasn’t the primary working language of the censorship office it had to pass through. It was pleasing to find the building and the trees creating these kinds of delay in the gallery. The way the text would suddenly come into focus, I realised, also mirrored the experience of going through piles of handwritten letters in the archive which required patience and frustration to decipher and suddenly coming across one that is typed or printed, and it is immediately legible.

So, on the one hand the viewer had to move to be in the right place to read the texts; but on the other, if they found themself in the right place, the text was there to meet them, even if they had not been intending to read it – it would happen to them willy nilly (or so was the idea). As I mentioned above, part of the residency brief was to deal with the contemporary relevance of the archive, and to understand how the Holocaust has shaped our present understanding of genocide. I wrote before about having applied to do the residency as a way of making use of my skills in the context of the present genocide in Gaza. What I produced is of such oblique use in this context to be basically irrelevant, although some of the thinking that went into it was directly drawn from present questions to do with the representation of suffering, the use of emotive language and images, the role of chants and slogans and how we should understand what they mean, the value of explicitness in political speech and art. I came away feeling I’d failed – which seemed to have been probably necessary all along – to create both a meaningful response to the personal archives of refugees from the Holocaust and a piece of work that would be useful and good in the present. As many of us have, I’ve allowed myself to feel despondent and to find it hard to work at all when thinking about my powerlessness in the face of killing, destruction, forced displacement and forced starvation, but have felt that that feeling was also cowardly and self-indulgent. At the same time, any disciplined commitment to a long-term project can feel like an almost callous abdication of an urgent responsibility to produce something for now – but what?

The other day I went to a gig in which one of the pieces had been written by my friend and collaborator, Grace Connolly Linden. It was a poem that she had scored visually, which was then interpreted by the group. The text was read through a megaphone and a range of sounds were made around it of increasing violence. My impression had been that the text and the sounds were in some kind of tension: I wasn’t able to pick out or concentrate much on the words, but it began ‘I have tended to forget, like a garden’ and I heard mentions of flowers; a friend said it had sounded ‘pastoral’. I asked her to send me the score.

When I read it, I found it was in fact about Gaza, specifically about the work of mourning and response that was possible from afar. It was nothing like anything else I’d read or heard on the theme, which has often taken the form of a kind of self-reflexivity – what can I, or poetry, do? – or else simplicity, sometimes to the point of sentimentalism or sententiousness. This was complex, unafraid to be oblique and difficult. It didn’t condescend by refusing its subject all of the resources of poetry, instead, drawing on the history of literature of lament and complaint (Virgil, the Book of Job), mustering these resources as a kind of offering. The flowers were from Louis Zukofsky’s “A” (‘To-day I gather all red flowers’). It was rich, polyphonic, multimodal, sensory rather than intellectual or moral. And it was beautiful, and full of feeling – about feeling – but not in the least sentimental; clear about what it despised but not reproducing the sensationalism of its antagonists. As with Chebo’s drawings I immediately saw how narrow my previous understanding had been of the form that art that is about, and against, atrocity can take, and how restraint and austerity can be a form of cowardice. The text of part of it is here; the whole score is not available to read anywhere yet, but I hope it will be soon.

Grace has also organised the printing of a fundraising t-shirt, designed by Aisha Farr with Angela Shackel, using the refrain of a miners’ union song, with a limited range hand-dyed by Grace, with all of the proceeds going towards the legal costs for people arrested at Workers for a Free Palestine demos. You can buy it here. (She asks me to add that there is a risk of certain sizes and colours selling out before we have had a chance to update the site – sorry!)

I was invited to write something for the press release, and I wanted to have a go at saying something that accurately conveyed how I felt, in a press release-friendly way, but what I drafted sounded in the end quite bland and so I said nothing. When I’ve seen other people’s Bookseller announcements in the past, I’ve often been a bit embarrassed on their behalf for the hyperbole of the genre and the kinds of things people have to write for them. I think of the phrase ‘I’m humbled’, which I had got so used to reading that I was surprised to find an older writer complaining about it, and while I see her point, I also know what it is that people mean by it: honour and humility feel oddly close because, or at least when, the honour feels hardly deserved – perhaps you feel small, now, alongside the other people who have received the same honour, smaller than you felt before, among all of those who had not received it. Honour requires a reconfiguration of your sense of your position in the world, a stripping away of the kinds of pride that go with being un- or under-recognised. And recognition of any kind involves a kind of humility – to find that someone was listening all along, knew you all along, destroys the pride that it is tempting to take in believing yourself beyond earshot. Of course, it feels amazing, too; but honour, like love, entails the shedding of a lot of protective layers, and I can see why people have begun to reach for the idea that they are being humbled. From now on they can be a disappointment.

Something that really did feel humiliating was the way that the press release described me as an academic, and the rest of this post is about why I am not an academic, or at least, why I felt ‘owned’ by being described as one.

The reason I might be described as an academic is that I teach at a university. But I only do this a couple of hours a week – it is materially and in other respects a side gig. A friend said that it’s the university who should feel owned for not giving me a proper job, but I don’t actually want one, and stopped applying for permanent teaching and research positions several years ago. If you don’t want to be doing casual teaching, it is not a good job, and I have been involved in anti-casualisation campaigns at a previous UCU branch. But one thing we came up against there, which I found frustrating, was that a lot of people did not want us to demand the abolition or reform of casual teaching, because the work suited them, despite being contractually insecure and not paid well enough to be the sole source of income. The particular positions they held could have been worse, and having had several of these ‘could be worse’ positions there and where I teach now, I know what appeals about them. And one of the ways this job is appealing to me is that it allows me to have it both ways – to have all of the benefits of teaching at a university (which include things like access to libraries and resources, and the lubricating status that an institutional email address and line in your bio confer, but also the enormous pleasure of teaching, and of work which is for the most part rewarding and worthwhile) while not having to be an academic.

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Why am I not an academic? To my mind an academic is someone who has or is working towards having a permanent job in HE that involves research. I applied for all of the jobs of this sort going for a few years – which, in German, isn’t many – and then at some point realised that I disliked, and wasn’t particularly good at, almost every aspect of the job in its contemporary form. I didn’t suffer from the delusion that it was nothing but lecturing to rapt undergraduates, writing about poetry in a book-lined study, good wine at High Table – perhaps for a small number of people this still is the core of the job, but even at Oxford and Cambridge these are ever fewer, and I at the time was one of them, with a tiny salary and no job security but living a life almost entirely of the mind. The part of the job that I disliked was the endless applying for jobs and grants, the planning and proposing and ‘anti-writing’ of cover letters and project summaries that only had to be convincing and not true, the insisting of the relevance and importance of your work; and the delusion I suffered from was that this was something I was able to do and wanted to be doing for a living for the rest of my career. (Later, as one of my side gigs, I did do this for a living, drafting bid applications for an arts charity; but it is very different when you are doing something as a way to support the thing one really wants to be doing; and the smooth running of contemporary HE/‘academia’ relies on people believing that this is the thing that they really want to be doing to justify the workloads and energy and commitment involved.)

The turning point came when I interviewed for a much worse part-time teaching position at another institution and found that I couldn’t answer a question about a key conceptual term because I had no idea what it meant. It had been in the job description, but I had forgotten, or hadn’t been bothered, to find out what this specific subdiscipline even involved. In the abstract I had been happy, even excited, to ‘pivot’ to whatever the new thing in Modern Languages was, but in practice I had shown that I wasn’t able to do it.

Modern Languages is not one thing, and across its history as a discipline people have disagreed about what it is and is for. There are still people doing fairly ‘traditional’ literary scholarship in Modern Languages – as there are doing what is now ‘traditional’ theory, film studies, etc. – but all of these are basically dangerously humanities-focused at a point where departments in the humanities are being restructured or closing altogether. The German theorist Friedrich Kittler once said in an interview, ‘I had to cover up all I wanted to say with nice stories about young German poets.’ I have always remembered this line, taken entirely out of context, because I have never known if I also covered up what I wanted to say with nice stories about German poetry, or if I covered up what I wanted to say – nice stories about, or rather nice readings of, German poetry – with something more obviously relevant. My PhD was a way of doing the former, but very quickly after that I realised that whatever I did want to say, nice stories about German poets were unlikely to get me funding or a job or whatever.

But then the things that I said I wanted to say also didn’t get me funding or a job, and by that point I’d gone four years without saying anything: my monograph had come out, and an article, but they had been written long before, and in the meantime all I had written, at least in an academic context, were applications for grants and jobs. And conference papers, but they were intended for performance and not publication. And then reviews and essays of a non-academic sort, which I basically found I found more rewarding, and a good medium for saying what you wanted to say under the cover of nice stories about children’s books or folk song or nature writing or whatever it was – that were nonetheless also about children’s books and folk song and nature writing, the concrete and the particular more than just a pretext for the abstract and the general.

So, when I first stopped applying for jobs, the idea was that I would be a writer, by which I meant critic or essayist, writing some kind of non-fiction. But quite soon again I realised I couldn’t afford to spend time pitching, and in any case it had become yet another form of living one’s life entirely in projections and not in doing the thing itself. (I often wondered how architects got any satisfaction from their profession; recently I asked one, and only then realised that for architects, or some of them at least, the idea is the point, and the actual building the less intellectually satisfying, the more compromised part.) After many years of trying to convince my friend Hugh that criticism was an art, or at least as noble as one, I let myself be convinced by him instead, and tried to be an artist.

In May 2023, my friend Sam invited me to a workshop on art writing at which Kate Briggs was the guest of honour. She spoke about teaching at an art school, and the difference between art school and academia, particularly in terms of the ‘hard-earnedness’ of speech and writing in both. In an art school, she said, students are given the right to speak and write immediately, and, as part of the process, are moved or perhaps forced to do the kind of work that makes what they are saying true, and worth hearing. In academia you have to earn that right, and precisely because you have to earn it, you then feel resistant when you feel others are speaking without having earned it.

I was obviously resistant. I thought about a group I was part of with some friends, a collaborative creative research project, and how steep the learning curve had been for me at first, learning to work in a more intuitive way and respond to the others (many of whom are, in fact, academics!) in our discussions, coming up with ideas that were associative rather than backed by exhaustive reading. In the end, this is hardly that different from the way that a lot of academic research in the humanities begins with a ‘hunch’, but what was different was how unafraid people were to make connections that weren’t ‘true’ in the ordinary way, but, in another way, like rhyme, uncovered some more profound truth. At the same time, I knew to be suspicious of rhyme, and connections that felt as though they ought to lead to truth but didn’t, and was afraid to make the kinds of leaps others felt able to make, in case I was wrong.

What Kate said made perfect sense in the context of this group, and it seemed the way forward had to be something like the process that she offered as an alternative to hard-earnedness – to do something, and in the doing work out how to make the thing you were doing good and truthful. The way that I tell the story to myself is that the week after the workshop I began writing the novel that became How to Live Together (the title borrowed with gratitude from Kate’s translation of a lecture notes by Roland Barthes). I’d actually already started it, although initially as an essay, and I’d also already decided to spend my spare time writing it after the workshop and the associated preparation was over. But when I did write it, I thought of Kate’s talk.

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I went from academia to art because I wanted to do something different to what academics did. But the two have, I think, never been closer. On the one hand the tendency, in contemporary poetry for instance, for art to borrow academic discourses and the essay form, which Hugh has written about (in a poem) here. And on the other, the fact that academia so often now turns to and funds creative practitioners as part of research projects, or in the context of postgraduate programmes – the rise of creative-critical and practice-based PhDs or postdocs. A friend finds this a bit dismaying, thinking of the students who have a good idea for a purely academic research project who now have to compete with established practitioners of various kinds for funding – that academic vs creative knowledge is now a zero-sum game. From the side of the practitioner this is, or seems, nothing but good news. Funding of this sort in the arts is increasingly hard to get, and comparatively tiny. If you’re an organisation, you might get project funding over three years, but not as an individual. I often think of the fact that a Leverhulme postdoc is worth three times the Turner Prize, in some cases three times the Booker.

Academia is increasingly a conduit by which artists (i.e. including writers) can get paid at all, whether as teachers or through grants and projects; the organisation I used to write bids for now gets most of its funding through university partnerships, for instance. Perhaps the comparison above was provocative – unlike a prize, a Leverhulme is still a job, with strings of various kinds attached and a manager to whom one is accountable, although for early career academics they are basically treated as something like a prize. But it seems that if the best living for artists is to be made via academia – with all of the compromises that having HE as a patron involves, including the particular way that projects in HE have to be conceived – this has to be limiting for the kind of art that is made. (I obviously think this goes for scholarship too.)

The same goes in another way for the artists who are brought on board to large research projects as part of the public engagement strategy. As the same friend pointed out, the increased incorporation of creative practice in the traditional humanities correlates with, in her words, ‘a massive decline in the prestige of academic knowledge’. If anything an academic in the humanities might do with funding is treated with incuriosity and indifference, if not scorn, then some of it might as well go to an artist, who can also be commissioned to put on a workshop or two as a way of outsourcing the engagement with local communities or lay audiences that is now a condition of public funding. (I’m not against workshops, but have been involved with some that were so underattended that they did not really engage anyone, and were put on essentially so that all parties in the partnership could tick a box. And, at the same time, funding is pulled from things that people do actually attend and which have a real function in the community – I’m thinking of the situation in Great Yarmouth, as described by Lotte L. S. in a recent Red Herring Press newsletter). The openness to the new ways of knowing and working that art promises academia, while admirable its own, is a consequence of an anxiety about the old ways of knowing and working, which, if rigorously pursued, will probably get your department shut down. But the flourishing of art within the humanities is, by the same token, a sign that no one really cares about what art is and can do, either.

*

Some of these ideas are also in the novel, but I’ll do a proper introduction to it at some point. 2027 feels a long way away. It’s unbelievable to me that Fitzcarraldo (and Ecco, Text, Anagrama) have backed me and the novel to this extent, and hard to talk about it in a way that is neither gushing nor stilted. But I’m very glad whatever the case. If you’re in the UK then I hope you are enjoying this good spring day.

My contribution is a sequence called ‘Ghost Sonnets’, which is a go at thinking through the idea that the British are peculiarly interested in ghosts, haunting, possession – especially places and landscapes. A French friend confirmed this for me – she had moved to the UK because she said that nobody in France would supervise a PhD on ghosts – and made the convincing claim that it was based on latitude, which I then found elaborated in Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North (‘Ghosts in Europe are northern. It is panic terror that belongs to the south: possession at noon, sudden fear born from heat haze, and empty tracts of hillside that are suddenly inhabited. […] But the revenant narrative is essentially of the north, and is a product of the occluded weather and broodings upon the fate of the dead.’) – as well as his Arctic Elegies. I tried this idea out in Brittany last November and everyone claimed that the French do believe in ghosts, and to prove it brought out a French monograph on haunted houses. When I read it, it turned out that all of the case studies were English people having seen ghosts in English houses. (For the two weeks I stayed there I kept saying to myself and others that the house, an old manor house, felt unusually unhaunted; on the last night I was kept up by a knocking sound against the wall by my bed, which I couldn’t help but believe was revenge.)

This idea of haunting then – the national obsession with ghosts, fairies, possession, all the neo-folklore stuff, the haunted houses, the ghost stories – has something to do with geography, with latitude and meteorology, but also seems to be a convenient way to deal with, or release the pressure of, the unease of finding oneself or the nation in a relation of non-supernatural power – a way of making manageable and perhaps also eroticising an unease to do with, for instance, empire, class, and so on. And the convenience of this began to unsettle me – that the UK above all things does not need another way to understand itself as exceptional, somehow peculiarly haunted, and does not need any more self-regarding nostalgia, any exceptionalising of its housing stock and land, even of a critical kind.

At the same time I find it hard to fault someone like M John Harrison, who makes of the (in this case specifically) English weird something that does seem productively to gnaw at the roots of the exceptionalism itself, most explicitly in the recent story ‘English Heritage’, and in a slightly different way in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (the only good novel about Brexit?), but also the post-Thatcher 90s novels set around the border of Yorkshire and Lancashire.1 The reason I think so much about all these English and Welsh and Scottish and Anglo-Irish ghosts, Fitzgerald, Spark, Bowen, Mantel – Aickman – as well as M R James and all the rest – is because I feel at home with them, of course. But then I worry that this is a guilty pleasure, a way of escaping that masquerades as a kind of critical engagement.

All of this is something like the argument of one of the poems in the sequence, and feeds into another, which is about the popularity of homoerotic heritage TV/film in the 1980s. They’re also about my own susceptibility not just to literary depictions of malign supernatural forces but also to the fear of them, and then other ideas and things that I needed in some way to exorcise. Robert Aickman, the writer of ‘strange stories’ (and founder of the inland waterways association) whose story ‘The Swords’ was another important starting point for the project – fairs, disembodied hands, (homo)sexual menace – liked to make the point that the successful ghost story was ‘akin to poetry’ – specifically in ‘deal[ing] with the experience behind experience: behind almost any experience’. (He also claimed that England ‘is generally regarded as the metropolis of the supernatural, as of lyric poetry.’) I wanted to see if I could – like Hardy or Charlotte Mew, or indeed Keats – write poems that were ghost stories. I’ve included one below; you can buy the pamphlet here. In it are also interviews with Kevin Meayers and with the historian Sally Alexander, who wrote a pamphlet on St Giles’s Fair in Oxford, and poems by Hugh Foley, Grace Connolly Linden and Aisha Farr. There is also an insert made by the poet Edwina Attlee of an imaginary exhibition of fairings based on Southwark’s Cuming collection, etchings by Daisy Nutting, and endpapers and a essay by Angela Shackel. And two stickers! If you’re in London, I’m reading the sequence along with other things at Hard Work, at Ryans N16, 4pm tomorrow (Sun 2nd March) – £5/pay what you can, cash on the door.

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4.1, Lancaster
The house much warmer now. Undersalted my porridge, having oversalted it yesterday. Walking in the rain by the marsh, and then back there at dusk. Flocks of lapwing, unseen until they rose in racing clouds then settled. Blackbirds cackling everywhere. In London you are never properly alone. London this, London that. I don’t know how anyone does a PhD in London.

6.1, train to Lakes
Fields pale green w/ frost, fells pink over the fields. Wisps of clouds in the valleys.

Later, Booths in Windermere
I’m not tough. I am wearing two hats.

Later, pub in Coniston
Raven with light shining in a way that made it look grey at the neck, like a jackdaw. Kestrel near the top, perfectly still, artefactual.

8.1, train to London
Gull just flew low by the birch, turned into the light. Like a flock of lapwing. On the train back to London now. Enjoying calling it ‘tepid’ and ‘lukewarm’ to people.

Woman a few seats away has a lovely pleat at the back of her shirt. Her belt is missing one of the loops, the central one at the back; to see it was surprisingly intimate.

11.1
Dreamt H. was my wingman. His tip was to open conversations with the words of ‘We’ve got a groovy thing going baby’.

12.1
Just remembered the smell of the grit spreader – unexpected, malty.

19.1
Herzog double bill – intoxicating soap-like smell of the woman in front.

22.1
Purest late winter feeling, napping in the cold sun, the light exposing things I feel I have not seen for months. Odd pressure of hopefulness, possibility, that will dissolve, probably, come 4:45 and the dark.

25.1
I intended some days ago to write of having dreamt I was looking after someone else’s baby, and was curious rather than anxious at how they picked it up and supported its lolling head.

27.1
Woke at 3 to see a red light coming from my computer. I began to believe it was on fire; but so peacefully as to not be quite of this world. But it was the laser from A.’s USB mouse. The moon, intensely bright, with lines of cloud in grey against the sky, the robinia silhouetted. I worried I’d been cursed by looking directly at the full moon. Creaking, as if F. were wandering about, or someone on the landing, but no doors had opened or closed. Thinking that it would come as a relief if the house were haunted.

15.2
Blackbird sitting in the cream apple blossom, yellow beak. Where is An Area of Darkness? Pigeons in the tree like raisins, fat blobs on the branches.

21.2
Dreamt of a bird running up to the window, mocking me, trying to get in. It turned out to be a human in a costume. I looked through scrapbooks of fashion history to ‘identify’ the costume.

27.2, bus to Germany
Through the high, barbed wire-topped fence, past the scrubby sand grass, a small group of birds, pale grey, in a wide, bright pool, reflected in it.

28.2, Marbach
Dreamt of a very precocious girl who claimed that 1967 was her favourite post-war year. I combed her tangled hair with my fingers.

6.3, Lausanne
Swiss plug sockets beautiful, unearthly. I couldn’t find them because I could hardly believe that this was what these delicate arrangements of holes were.

9.3
Hearing a blackbird and thinking it is already dusk – and seeing that it isn’t, it’s far from being dusk – and realising all of a sudden that winter is over

6.4
Thought I could hear a bell ringing at the school, but it was the bubbles in a glass of water.

18.4
Stood at the wrong bus stop and ended up in the wrong part of Central London. In St James’s Park. Hungover, bright sun. Sense of everything being physically constituted of regret, every stone and substance made of it.

20.4
Beginning to feel superstitious about April, a month of bad luck, and still 10 days left of it. And then the fear that having named this I have brought it about.

23.4
Waking when the heating goes on, the sudden heat and then overhearing the prints clipped in the sock dryer over the radiator jostling in the thermal.

26.4
Dreamt of being at an airport, waiting to fly. Seeing owls up close through the windows, the terrible peaks of the Alps.

3.5
Set alarm for 5.30, of course decided not to wake.

6.5
Nice to see the pothos without its blanket of white mould. The rain, the bank holiday, wicked sense of having run away, the little birds dashing from bush to bush.

7.5
Dreamt of A. finding a piece of fur in a hearth, realising that it was feathers, the downy front of a bird, as if birds sloughed off their skin as they grew.

13.5
A child in a pushchair, snoring. Somehow disturbing, in her utter trust. Her sense of safety on the overground.

Have I said yet how warm it is out, how it smells of summer in the evenings. Stopped mid-run, halfway up the hill, tired but also shocked by the smell of elderflower.

17.5, accommodation outside Huddersfield
Students on the lawn barbecuing and listening to the White Album. The air warm, damp. Earlier I thought I heard a pheasant but it was something being hit regularly.

18.5, pub in Holmfirth
Dreamt of bluebells, walking near them, my path not through them. The light on oak, when the air is damp.

In Holmfirth, ‘paying my respects’ to M John Harrison. It’s sunny, men are out. Everyone is out. 5pm. I feel I could walk forever. No dippers on the Holme.

25.5
Want to write here about Cold Crematorium, which I just finished. Wide Awake festival in the park, Slowdive, the sounds enter the house and reverberate oddly, as if they came from within it, but very far away, as if that were life and I were outside it. I can hear a great spotted woodpecker in the tree, chip chip. Debreczeni seeking refuge in unconsciousness. The squalor, unimaginable; the proximity to death, the thinking of nothing but survival, but also the hope of death, choosing death.

26.5
Waking at 3am and it has just started raining. The point where it turns; it’s summer, the windows are thin or open, the sound close but you are dry.

1.6
Wind overnight, the rustle of prints, the sound of the door opening.

7.6
Have spent a good amount of today and some of yesterday, in Paris, worrying about an article Herta Müller wrote about Gaza and whether I want to continue working with the various poets who approved of it. Now (8.6) it feels like a storm in a teacup.

9.6
The sound of a bluebottle, distracting and at the same time of summer and so beautiful. Grey out, cool. Falling asleep at 1.30, foxes in the garden, or cats, fighting. Disconcerting sense of our sovereignty over this place being illusory, radically relative.

12.6
Fell asleep thinking about Zionism.

17.6, Huddersfield
Busy gulping coffee. Thinking about infection and what curd tart is.

19.6
Waiting for the night bus at Holborn having been delayed 3 hours by being accused of stealing a man’s wedding ring, a story I have now told too many times to write here.

28.6, Torquay
Dreamt of fashioning a rollercoaster for a tiny little cat.

10.7, Torquay
Dreamt that there were huge green iguanas catching fish in the Cornish sea.

14.7
A day of birdwatching yesterday has made me hyperaware of birds and birdlike movements.

15.7
The sky very dark, surely only the rain, and not the winter. But already the autumn feeling is here. Wet terracotta from watering a plant, a wonderful smell.

21.7
Dreamt of bateleurs and short-toed eagles flocking in the sky. Dreamt N. got a tattoo related to Mayröcker, or someone like her. Dreamt I had forgotten to make Christmas cards.

Yesterday, window open, waking up in the damp air, a little cool, hearing a woodpecker, and I for a moment felt I could be on a campsite in Germany.

Hungover from drinks with A., I cycled around Herne Hill seeing male couples holding, or almost holding, hands, and feeling I did not want to hold a man’s hand, could not, until I was one. And then thinking about women, that I could not hold a woman’s hand because I was one – a man, that is. A fantasy of perfect equality.

22.7
Both windows open, prints, still hanging, rustling wildly. Was woken up in the night by them. Vivid dreams, of seeing a rare small mammal that I could not identify, white and round and very fast.

26.7, Cricklewood
The cats very quiet and sluggish, though enough animosity there. At 7.15am, as the alarm went, the older came and called for food and, as I addressed her, threw up on the carpet.

27.7, Cricklewood
Swifts overhead, louder than Herne Hill, perhaps just because it is quiet here, really quiet. It feels a lovely day, cool still but no clouds, will be hot. I will walk the final northern sections of the Loop.

31.7, Cricklewood
Found myself dreaming of bread and butter pudding. Locked myself out, barefoot, taking out the plastic. Had to be let in by the next-door neighbour and climb over; one of the cats took fright.

Moments of doubt about my ability to continue saying things about Rohmer, what if I’m not clever enough. But that’s foolish. Just say what you do understand.

Later: Broadway Market. Strong but not totally unpleasant smell of shit, manure perhaps, or actual dogshit, on the wind. Maybe just the smell of warm streets in summer.

1.8, Cricklewood
Afraid that one of the cats has disappeared. Ramen. The younger one. When I woke I could find neither, but the older had been hiding. Tuppence staring for minutes at the same spot in the hedge.

Later: Tuppence seems at a loss without her sibling rivalry.

Later: Each little noise I think is the return of Ramen.

12.8, Isle of Man
Dreamt of explaining Oxford philosophy to H. Weather turned overnight – enormous gusts, light rain. The air now damp, sky thick + grey. The wind like the foley sound of a storm at sea. One flash of lightning – unless it was a torch.

13.8, train Liverpool–London
Nearly got a good photo of a chough, but it flew off as I pressed the shutter.

19.8
Woke up realising that I might have put apostrophes in the wrong place in my Substack post. That and other thoughts kept me in bed for nearly two hours.

22.8, Cricklewood
Did not leave the house all day – did not even open the door. Just went to put the rubbish out and it is much warmer than I thought, the wind and the rain very warm and a little sinister.

23.8, Cricklewood
Long vivid dreams of out-of-date milk.

24.8, Cricklewood
A cat, Ramen, just dashed out and is cowering under the garden table from the rain.

28.8, Cricklewood
Ramen looks like she is glaring at Tuppence. She may just have her eyes only half open.

2.9, train to Sheffield
House party yesterday, garden party. The tiny slugs that got on all the plates and were brought into the kitchen by phone torchlight last night, in the morning arching curiously on the kitchen towel.

5.9
Perfect September morning, rain, green, grey.

12.9
Dreamt of boring Jeremy Noel-Tod with the meaning of the word Novella.

26.9
Reading Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, and listening to a crane fly patter around the room. Rain outside. Dark, traffic.

27.9
Dreamt I was in a horror movie in which Hell was run as a ‘paf-like space’.

17.10
Once again distracted by trail shoes.

20.10
Bag of apples, wet, earlier. Split in the street. One apple rolled right into the road and was sheared by a motorbike.

2.11, Brittany
Today overcast again. Window shuts out the birds, but from the toilet I could hear it, whatever it is, the woodpecker.

3.11, Brittany
Dreamt of scooping cheese and gravy into a box to make it melt and getting it on the sleeve of a jumper. An elaborate dream in a Wetherspoons. I had programmed certain mugs to make a special noise near one another.

5.11, Brittany
Dreamt of scaup that had the faces of identical lads, their hair in a dinner ladies’ hair net.

6.11, Brittany
Watching the sheep eat with such gusto. As if every new bite were a particularly delicious morsel, but it’s all they do, all day. Table smells of beer from when I used my hand as a funnel last night.

Later: two men arrive in a car. I half-overhear the conversation and become convinced that we are about to be funny gamesed.

10.11, bus to London
13 hours late. The bus hit a boar. I had hoped, finding out that the windscreen had not shattered, that we might make it to Paris. But when the journey was cancelled and we all had to get off, I saw what had made the tinkling sound: the entire front corner of the bus, the lights, all of it, taken out. The spectacle of this on its own somehow made up for the delay.

23.11
Dreamt of going to San Francisco to see birds; there were skinny black and white pigeons with velvet red patches on their shoulders like shawls.

1.12, Snaresbrook
Slept badly because the cat spent much of it having to be as close to me as possible, cuddled up in ways that made me afraid of squashing him.

5.12, Snaresbrook
Yesterday, falling asleep on my back on the couch having gone to Wanstead Flats to look for barn owls, I pictured a mouth and, under the side of the chin like a jowl, a row of bulging pig udders.

13.12, Snaresbrook
Dreamt that the cat could speak, and could speak German better than me.

18.12
Wind, grey sky, the kind that may never get light. The light disappearing outside, and I ran to the park to look for woodcock, which of course I did not see, but I did witness the roosting of the parakeets in the thicket of poplar. I had heard them the other week but not seen them until now. It was spectacular, uncanny with the people doing Tai chi slowly beneath the tree, black in the winter dusk, parakeets wriggling and darting around, the more you looked the more you saw, like stars or spots.

28.12
Reading the Thesiger mountains book in the hope of finishing it before the end of the year; it is almost unreadably boring, the austerity of his earlier books now just one mountain pass – one attractive village, one tribe – after another.

29.12
Outside is foggy still, the fog a burnt cream colour as it got light, now ghostly white. Not cold out, just dark, inhospitable. Fluffy white fungus on the soil of the pothos, and flourishing like a ruff around the bottom of the aspidistra’s pot. But no time to sort them until I am back.

31.12, bus
Noticing as if for the first time the gorse by the motorway, in bloom. ‘When gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of season’ – which I must have got from Jarman somewhere.

––

Some of these have been published as ‘Dreams of Birds’ in i think it is a bird, edited by Grace Linden and Hannah Machover, and a couple are about to be published, in edited form, in the afterword to my book of translations for Holocaust Centre North, coming out in April. Thank you all for reading/subscribing; happy new year!

When I applied for the job, Israel had been bombarding Gaza for six months. If this had not been the case, I might not have applied. I had previously taught literature that dealt with the Holocaust as part of university German literature courses, but it is not my specialism, and for the most part I had deliberately avoided reading or thinking, and certainly writing, about National Socialism or the Holocaust and its aftermath. I was put off by how too obviously ‘important’ it was, and so, in a way, ‘easy’. The more respectful and dignified approach felt like something close to silence. A friend has written an article about the epigraphs to Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, arguing that these allowed Williams to connect the book to the concerns of post-war society without producing kitsch. When I was reading around for the residency I came across Glen Newey’s review of a ‘Moral history of the twentieth century’ in the LRB, which Nikhil and his co-author also cite:

A lurking non-sequitur needs to be nailed before it’s possible to think clearly about the matters the book tries to address. This is that the undeniable importance of these events makes important whatever is said about them. It’s tough to think of anything which is both true and unbanal, and it plainly gets tougher the more saturated the market becomes. … Glover tells us that ‘no reaction of disgust and anger is remotely adequate’ to ‘this ultimate expression of contempt’ … Does he take his own point, before or after? No. … Those who write in this vein … are convinced on one matter: they are serious. I do not think that we have to take them at their own evaluation.

Nonetheless, something of the squeamishness around kitsch, a kind of gentlemanly squeamishness, had begun to feel off to me, a form of cowardice, at least on my part, an unwillingness to risk getting it wrong. And in any case, for the first time I could not avoid making work about the Holocaust. Silence, or extreme obliqueness, were not options. I was glad that The Zone of Interest had come out and I so had a sense that it was possible to make good, ambitious, imperfect work about the Holocaust. Quite late in the day I also watched Farocki’s films about the Holocaust and its memory – Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Respite [for which I am right now making English subtitles and will link when they are done], Transmission – and these also reassured me that it wasn’t impossible to get it right. A friend tried to reassure me by reminding me that the bar was low. But that’s exactly the problem – I don’t want it just not to be bad, I want it to be good. Or rather, it didn’t feel like a spectrum, from bad to good, but a binary: either kitsch or anti-kitsch.

But it’s not always clear what kitsch is. Or perhaps it’s more like that there’s a horseshoe of kitsch. At one end sentimental stories with vividly represented suffering that lead to an easy emotional resolution. At the other, the expression of concepts in material form in a way so direct as to be a gimmick. It’s partly about the ease of consumption, but it’s not just that, because difficulty can become its own form of kitsch. I’ve never been to the Jewish Museum in Berlin but was very affected by an analysis I read of it in the PhD of a friend when I was doing my Masters, in which she quoted a review by the critic Edward Rothstein, which found the use of form to create fractures and disorientation pretentious and trivialising: ‘rather than feeling something profound, you almost expect moving platforms and leaping ghosts, as in an amusement park’s house of horrors’.

I was asked, both in the interview for the job, and in a later interview, why I had applied for it, and the (arrogant) answer was that it sounded hard. Hard but, for the first time, personally at least, necessary. I should note here, although I think it is probably obvious, that I have no family connection to the Holocaust and I am not Jewish. I certainly did not previously think that it was necessary to have a family connection to begin to think about it, but I was always a bit grossed out by how eager non-Jewish British people were to study Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which I suppose I saw as a kind of rubbernecking at the suffering, on the one hand, and, on the other, the shame, of peoples they saw as other to them. Not to mention also the inane and dangerous self-congratulatory national mythology in the UK around the second world war, as well as the Kindertransport (etc.). I wanted to do the job because I wanted to make people take ownership of a history they had long assumed belonged to somebody else, which obviously meant that I would have to, too; and that would also mean risking doing it badly.

I wanted to do the job because I had, like everybody else, been feeling powerless in the face of a war that felt close to home, something that I was implicated in. (The last few years have been a very stark demonstration of how clearly these feelings of implication and emotional involvement are conditioned by our own histories and commitments – for which reason I find it dispiriting when people then just accuse each other of having bad reasons for feeling implicated or not, rather than noting the way that these impulses work and accepting them at the same time as moving past them. I recently read Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being, which I saw recommended by Lara Pawson, a book about this phenomenon, among many other things.) Other people were dealing with these feelings by posting things on social media, and finding justification for this as a form of action. This didn’t feel available to me; nor did it feel right, in fact, although I could see that I had reasons for wanting to think it wasn’t right, and it’s possible I was wrong – more than possible. But whatever the case, it wasn’t an option for me, temperamentally speaking, either as a way of ‘doing something’ or of feeling as if I were ‘doing something’. I went on a couple of marches but felt somehow grossed out by the way it seemed to be an excuse to see and be seen in the pub afterwards. I have been on a couple more since then and have used my discomfort as a way to justify slipping away halfway through, the real reason for which is just the normal dislike of being ‘committed’, as they say in climbing, for instance if it were to end in a kettle.

Here, then, was an opportunity to ‘do something’ using the actual competences I had, and something I could make my own, something that could be an ‘authentic’ intervention at a time when the main forms of action appeared to involve aligning oneself with the words or slogans of others, or else faking a kind of authenticity by presenting oneself as an expert. Obviously there is a small number of people who really are experts, in one way or another, whom I relied on to help think things through, but they couldn’t be models for my own work and engagement. For that I would have to look to what it was that I, specifically, had to offer. I’m not the only person in the country and on the left who can translate from German and worry about what it is to produce kitsch. (Although I have sometimes felt that not enough people on the left have worried about this over the last 13 months.) But I am at least one of them, and I applied, and got the job.

I wanted to be able to ‘do something’, then, although what and how was unclear. But I also wanted, at least as a side effect, to transform my attitude towards German as a language. One of my current gigs is teaching German via translation at a university, which I have been doing as a side or main gig for nearly a decade. But (as I’ve written about before) I feel very ill at ease in German and Germany, a feeling which has grown the longer I’ve spent not spending time in Germany, but which began in Germany, in 2015, when I realised that another 6 months would not be enough to be able to speak and write as quickly and precisely as I wanted to be able to speak in German – perhaps even a lifetime would not be enough. I couldn’t give up, because I was halfway through a PhD in German, and I believed in the work I was doing, and wanted to continue doing it. But this trouble with the language, which was also a trouble with the culture, reached existential proportions, and I ran away from Germany, which I did again two years later.

I once tried to develop a project about the history of Modern Languages teaching in the UK, specifically the role of literature within it, and as part of this I read the memoirs of Elsie Butler, a professor of German literature who famously hated Germany and the Germans. Hating Germany in the 1930s is a different kettle of fish to hating Germany in the 2010s, but she had hated Germany in the 1920s, too (but was that then just xenophobia? was my own hatred of Germany a kind of xenophobia?). Doing this preparatory research I found scholars and readers wanting to separate the literature from the country and its politics, and wanting to act as caretakers of German culture at a point when Germany was morally unable to do so itself – an impulse which I wasn’t always convinced by, but there were others whose left-wing humanism, Roy Pascal for instance, I was drawn to. (I also came across quite a few examples of academics whose love of Germany and German culture meant that they continued working with people and institutions who were signed up, sometimes enthusiastically, to National Socialism, even into the 1940s.)

I have often liked the way that different cultures have different versions of what another country’s national literature looks like. Of the specifically British canons of German literature, there is one based around what texts work well in a UK teaching context. At one point it was, I think, shorter 19^th century prose fiction. Now, perhaps, it’s German written by those with less straightforward relations to Germanness, whether German-speaking people from outside of Germany who migrated there in the 90s, or Turkish- or Afro- or Arab Germans, or those who have learnt German as a second language. (Germans, for their part, have all, or so it seemed to me when I first moved there, read the novel Harold and Maude – actually the screenplay of the film of the same name – neither of which I had ever heard of, and have only since read because I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Germany.)

When I conceived of this project as transforming my attitude to German, I understood this as gaining a kind of confidence in it, understanding myself as ‘good enough’ in some way, and so being able to enjoy getting better at it and using it, rather than the joyless and fearful avoidance that had characterised most of my encounters with German since finishing the PhD. But when I handed in the most recent draft for feedback, I realised that on some level there was an element of revenge in it too, or at least, as Tom, the other writer-in-residence put it, resistance. This is both a personal revenge on a language which has, it sometimes feels, ruined my life. But it is a revenge that has wider implications – tied up in the ways that Germans really do feel they own certain aspects of their language and culture and exclude whomever they like from that ownership, and which make me desire to hit out at them, to show them how smug and condescending and limited and wrong they are.

I’ve not spent so much time in Germany, but enough that I am halfway able to understand what has gone wrong when there are moments of incomprehension – like when whoever it was on Twitter, some embassy even, suggested that Germany was an expert at recognising antisemitism, and all anglophones simply could not believe their eyes, and couldn’t see how the Germans couldn’t see that this was an unbelievable faux pas. Over the past 13 months analysis of German Zionism and philosemitism, which previously I had only ever found in niche leftwing blogs and online magazines, has become much more mainstream, and I think there is now a more general understanding of how this might not seem a faux pas from a German perspective. I don’t know how much this has gone the other way – there have been times when, from the little I have been following of things in Germany, it seemed that there was a growing understanding of the non-German perspective. I was pleased, for instance, when the president of the Goethe-Institut wrote in Der Spiegel about the way Germany seemed increasingly illiberal to international cultural organisations – although on the level of legislation things seem worse than ever.

And from the other side, I have been glad of what an experience of the German perspective has allowed me to see of the UK from the outside, especially around Palestine. I had friends in Berlin who had been in the antideutsch movement, or were still halfway aligned with it, some who had even volunteered in Israel, and while they had different commitments by the time I knew them, they had a sense of the problems that go unseen on the left. Talking to them made me realise how ignorant I was, and how much the moral obviousness of the injustices in Palestine, historical and contemporary, had meant that I had left many other things unexamined. And it also made me realise how historically contingent certain left positions are; which is not to say that they are wrong, but that holding one position and not another is sometimes a matter of luck more than critical engagement and a nose for the truth. This was 2015; two years later I felt I was going insane as people around me denied there was such a thing as left antisemitism, and two years after that I felt I was going doubly insane as the good faith of people who did recognise that there was such a thing as left antisemitism was exploited, and I strongly felt I had been had.

The last 13 months has changed the world’s attitude to Germany and German. This has felt like a kind of relief. Some of the things I felt slightly insane for knowing about at all, like the antideutsch, are now common knowledge, or closer to it. Hearing Emily Dische-Becker talk about the competitiveness of analysis, the ‘pseudo-expertise’ around antisemitism that characterises the antideutsch, felt like letting go of some kind of secret psychic burden, as did reading Wolfgang Streeck mention the way that German culture ‘perceives dissent as selfish and as a threat to social and political unity’ (‘it’s also seen as pointless’, he adds). (Dische-Becker also reminded me of how much my antipathy to the antideutsch had been based on the fact that they were doing what I, in principle, wanted to be doing – a critique of the left from the left, a politics of anti-naivety – and they believed they were doing it better than me; and of the sheer machismo of it all, which I was also reminded of when I was in Leipzig the other year, at an antideutsch bar for a friend’s party, the bar staff all tall men in sleeveless t-shirts, lean and muscled, around whom I felt suddenly weedy and soft.) But it has also meant that my sense of what it means to be complicit has changed.

At one point, early on in the residency, a friend mentioned that someone I was collaborating with had liked a facebook post by a poet, the translation of whose work I had helped edit. The post was an article by Herta Müller on Gaza. I have never liked Herta Müller’s work and the fact that she took the position she took wasn’t itself surprising given what I understood her politics to be. But some of the things she said in it were truly shocking, and I felt lightheaded with rage and confusion – at the idea that someone could be so wrong, in all ways, so publicly wrong, and then be applauded for it. I hadn’t slept, which didn’t help. But I freaked the hell out about the translation work I was doing, having no idea what the right thing was to do now – to pull out or say something or sign some kind of open letter as a way of making my position clear, or whatever. And I also freaked out about the work I was doing for the Holocaust museum, because what I did not want was for it to be the kind of thing that could ever be used to support the kind of positions that Müller was taking. But at the same time I did not want it to be about my specific position either, a kind of personal polemic or, much worse, moral self-congratulation, nor explicitly about Gaza at all, because what I wanted was to show how being careful and precise could get you to the truth, of whatever historical situation the work landed in, which at that point I could not know and still now cannot, and could cut through the kitsch.

Anyway, I have let it loose into the world now, barring a few rounds of editing. It should be coming out in March. And I am still terrified. That I have made it too much about me, too little. That I’ve done all of the things I most hate when people talk about translation or other languages. That I’ve made it too sentimental, or too gimmicky. That I’ve been cowardly. And so on. That I’ve made it possible for people only to hear what they want to hear, or not to listen at all, to say ‘oh they would say that, because…’, when, I hope, I’ve said whatever I’ve said there and also said here because it was true.

Earlier this year I was asked to contribute to a pamphlet about birds – not about birds themselves, that is, but about the ways humans make meaning from them. I started by sending over a document made up of dreams I’d had about birds. I dream of birds a lot. A common dream is of seeing turtledoves, which I have not yet seen in the UK. Often they are in a tree in South London somewhere, perhaps close to where I live or somewhere very ordinary, and I realise I could have seen them all along, I just hadn’t been paying attention. Always the edge of self-reproach. That’s the meaning I make from birds, at least some of the time.

Other dreams are about seeing a new bird and going to put it on a list but then finding out I can’t, for some technical reason I have overlooked. Sometimes the reason is that I’m not where I think I am. In the dreams this is more dramatic: I think I am in England but I am in France, for instance. But this happens in real life, too. I think I am in London but realise that I have just stepped into Hertfordshire, and so the flycatcher I have just seen will not count towards my total for London. There was a point where I kept a garden list as part of a citizen science project. But I work from home a lot and it became a minute by minute obsession. That list had to be abandoned, but I dreamt of it for a long time after.

Right now, I’m spending ten days in the French countryside to finish a piece of writing. In freeing myself from the temptations and demands of London I have put myself in the way of the compulsion to look for birds. I have taken to resting my phone by the open window with the Merlin app running as I write – as if I could outsource distraction.

Share more and subtler distinctions

I want to write about birds, but not to communicate facts about them, in the manner of nature writing. Not because I dislike it, but because I am a bad naturalist and know very little. To offer facts authoritatively would feel inauthentic. When asked to describe the difference between a kestrel and a peregrine it turns out that I can. And I enjoy it – I’m a teacher after all, but these are exactly the urges I don’t want to indulge.

I can barely tell the difference between a peregrine and a pigeon. The spectacles of wishful thinking. I was pre-occupied by peregrines until recently because I’d not yet seen one this year, and this seemed to reflect badly on me in some way. I wasn’t paying enough attention; I wasn’t dedicated enough, I was too much indoors, I spent too much time writing. I had begun to think that it was not that they were there all along, like the turtledoves in the dream, waiting to be seen; rather, that they were hiding from me, deliberately, because I did not deserve them.

I do write about birds, but in forms where I don’t have to explain them. Where it’s more acceptable to let people look them up, or for them to stand for some kind of mystery. I often dream of phalaropes, because I think I will never see one, and because I find their name attractive. In my dreams the phalaropes are frilled, in bright colours, and fly past at eye level, impossibly slowly.

I think I can ‘treat myself’ to a specific bird. Sometimes it does work like that. I went to Mull and walked along a path where people often see white-tailed eagles. I looked up, and there they were, a pair. That felt undeserved, too easy. Something actually revolting almost, to go somewhere with lots of new birds, gorging on them. What I want from them is for them to elude me. No, I want their indifference. I go to them for their indifference.

The videos that are suggested to me on Instagram make clear that birds are not indifferent. In the videos, birds are loving and friendly and close. I like corvids and used to have a thing about jays, but have come to find them too obviously in relation to me – like when, the other day, I disturbed a jay crossing a footpath and it looked at me as it flapped away, tutting and resentful.

But the indifference of gannets, say, or kestrels. I got to know kestrels when I was flat-sitting in Berlin in an apartment on the fifth floor. The kestrels perched on the gutter above the balcony and then hunted just below, up and down the median of the boulevard. Once one perched on the balcony, but flew off when I came out. Flew off without seeming much to care, unlike the squirrel that found its way into the flat, leaping from room to room. (For the first time I really understood how much faster and more agile red squirrels are than grey, and why pine martens cannot catch them.)

There are so many kestrels in Berlin. On Tempelhofer Feld, when I was there, there were usually twelve or more, each with their own patch of grassland, hovering then moving on in an irregular rhythm repeated across the park, some of them only metres away from the path. They nest in the church towers and domes. I watched them, the sky pink, flying back and forth from the gutter above my head to the church across the street. And feeling as if it was their world I was in – that all along I had been wrong to imagine these structures mine.

Via Liam Shaw’s piece on the Great Auk in the LRB and the accompanying podcast I discovered that the notorious egg thief Daniel Lingham had been caught again this year. He is 71. When I first heard of such men, through a film by Andy and Peter Holden, I was shocked at the squalor and cruelty of modern egg collecting. This time my first reaction was envy at his knowledge, commitment and skill. The report said that he was recognised by his distinctive walking stick, and at first I understood this to mean a mobility aid. But then I realised they meant the kind of stick or pole people use when walking across rough terrain.

In Lancaster the other week I saw my first peregrines of the year. First on the marshes by the Lune, lapwing diving and tumbling haphazardly, the peregrine chasing through the flock then disappearing below the level of the marsh, into the gully of the Lune, and I didn’t pick it up again. And then two days later, at Silverdale station, crossing the tracks as night fell, pigeons scattering in advance.

In the end the excitement of seeing a new bird is often a little empty, because it is still essentially unknown. What I want is familiarity. Marvellous to walk somewhere and every sound, every movement is identifiable. Like knowing the way each of your housemates’ cooking smells. Mastery but of a loving sort, I hope.

The tagline of the podcast Bad Gays, made by Huw Lemmey – whose work I’ve written about here – and Ben Miller, is ‘Why do we remember our queer heroes better than we remember our queer villains?’. When they announced their book in 2021, I pitched to review it, hoping that it might offer an answer to my question. But it didn’t even offer an answer to theirs! So I had a go at answering both questions myself. One place I tried to do this is in a review of the Bad Gays book, as well as the translation by Marjorie Perloff of Wittgenstein’s coded notebooks from WW1. In this piece my main interest is queer goodness and badness, what we, and Lemmey and Miller, mean by these, what we gain and lose by expecting certain moral qualities from historical queer figures – or, in the case of Wittgenstein, what we gain and lose by forcing historical queer figures into the role of martyrs, witnesses to oppression, as opposed to, as I think most people agree Wittgenstein was, on their own idiosyncratic moral trip. This essay/review is now out in Cambridge Humanities Review here.

Another place was in the following, a lightly edited version of a proposal for a longer essay that I probably, now, won’t write.

*

The lives of the saints – in their recountings of feats of courage, charity, single-mindedness – are stories of lives lived differently, more intensely, than ours. But the saints are for us; the saints are us: people, who walked and ate, with favourite foods and songs, who were liked and disliked. We read about them to see what the shape of a human life can be, to broaden our sense of its possibility. We read about them to know what to do, to know how people like us have done it. We read with awe, frustration, envy, excitement, relief, feeling that the times have given us less space for heroism, suspecting that they haven’t. We read above all for the consolation of knowing that they, too, were here (a phrase I borrow from Daniel Walden); and by knowing their stories we are close to them, bound to them across time, between time and eternity.

I’m interested in queer hagiography; and I’m interested in the hagiographical impulse not in the making of biography but in the reading of it. It seems to me that the way queer people read (and write) about the lives of others is as a way of understanding their own lives as liveable: seeking in the retelling of other, real life, stories, models for themselves. That is, in the way queer readers read queer lives, a hagiographical spirit is kept alive, in a genre – biography – which has tried to distance itself from its forebears. Whether a long critical biography or the ‘personal life’ section of a Wikipedia page, we – queer people – understand life-writing as a kind of relic, in the way the saints’ lives once were: an artefact to prove that this life, however unusual or excessive, was lived.

Hagiography as a genre (rather than as a term of disparagement) is associated with the Middle Ages. But the lives of the saints have never stopped being written: in blog posts, in the FAQs on church websites, on Wikipedia, in sermons, as novelty features in newspapers to explain certain feasts – who was the real St Valentine? – in books for children, in gallery wall texts, in novels, in academic articles, in lyrical non-fiction. For some of the writers and their readers, these stories are curiosities, survivals from a more imaginative or more benighted time. For others, the stories make a supernatural claim: their subjects are not only people who once lived, but also people who, right now, are certainly in heaven. But for all writers and readers, there is a belief that ‘saints are not facts, but forces’, as a modern hagiographer, the Jesuit CC Martindale, has put it. Even the most demythologising account – by academic historians, or by the church itself when removing dubious saints from the calendar – understands, if in frustration, that a saint is not just the sum of the actions they performed when alive, but also their reception; that they live on in how they have changed the lives of others. The lives of the saints are an object in the world, acting upon the world; and they are, at the same time, responses to the world, taking the world as a given, writing themselves into the world as it is at a specific moment, responding to its particular needs. All writing on the saints has at its centre this collapsing of local and universal, temporal and eternal. In each case past lives are made legible to the present, are presented in terms a particular community of readers will understand and respond to.

More so than biography (particularly modern biography which pretends to objectivity) or history, hagiography looks with generosity on the need for the present to establish connections on its own terms with the past, to find ways of relating that are not abstract but concrete, not impersonal but social. Hagiography presumes a hunger for knowledge of others, for models to emulate, a hunger to be ‘seen’ and represented. Hagiography is aware that it is a genre that makes something happen; but unlike poetry it is, itself, not that thing. It is a modest genre, knowing that its contents and its framing but not its wording will be extracted and retold. It is a genre written for its readers, giving them what they need.

To read hagiographically is to read with that hunger, a hunger which – in different circumstances – queer readers have felt more acutely, and still feel, despite the cultural transformations of the last thirty years. ‘Hagiographical’, not as a term used to suggest the smoothing out of all the folds, the presentation of lives made respectable; rather, to describe a life shaped in a particular way for a particular audience, a life claimed and retold. Hagiography, that is, as a way of understanding one part of a community’s relation to another part of it, of showing the relation between individual and community, individual and history. Not, as biography has often wanted to do, as a way of encapsulating or exemplifying a particular period, showing, whatever the biographer’s historiographical position, the embeddedness of individual in history; rather, demonstrating their role in history now, the way they speak across to us as historical subjects in the present. Queer life-reading is not, then, just a question of ‘representation’: it is about understanding oneself in a lineage, and feeling, through reading, brought into it. And all life-writing can be read hagiographically (just as all hagiography can be read historically or biographically): it is an impulse, a way of reaching outwards and through texts, towards other people.

Conversion, a generic feature of some hagiographies, offers a model for tropes of coming out and transition in queer life-writing. Hagiographical writing and reading are characterised by a call to conversion in its truest and broadest sense. In seeking examples of lives in which we recognise our own, we open ourselves to seeing the ways our own lives are on the wrong track: we risk, that is, feeling ‘personally attacked’, ‘read to filth’. But we may also feel newly licensed and emboldened to choose life courses we may not have known about or dared before. Through reading, that is, we come to understand that something – whether being trans or gay, or dedicating ourselves to Christ – is ‘for us’: a joyful, but also terrifying, epiphany.

Perhaps this is a way to achieve a richer understanding of ‘community’, used now as an increasingly hollow euphemism and cliché when referring to queer lives (‘a member of the LGBT community’). Reading hagiographically is a way to think about the contingency of identity and to develop non-essentialist ideas of what it is to be gay or trans. Hagiography allows us to see the way queer identities are formed through others, that far from a living out of individual authentic selves, these selves develop through and against what is around us. Whether contemporaries or a canon of predecessors, our formation is as part of a transhistoric community, whose lives can be read, retold and lived out.

I use the word ‘we’, a word I have come to understand through my own reading. I am part of the ‘we’ of queers across time, who have lived their lives against the grain – at points – and with the grain at others, who have little in common other than that we who have come after have claimed them as part of our history. And I am part of the ‘we’ of the faithful, the communion of saints: believers on earth, and the blessed in heaven. Catholics and queers: these are two ‘we’s that are understood, and have understood themselves, as incompatible. But they have always drawn on each other for life.

*

Derek Jarman is perhaps the most prominent ‘queer saint’ and modern martyr, as well as a hagiographer in his own right. These terms can be taken literally: Jarman was canonised by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in his own lifetime, and many of his films and screenplays deal with saints (Sebastian) or make them (Wittgenstein). Jarman’s reception too seems to mirror that of Christian saints. His cottage in Dungeness became a shrine, a pilgrimage site, as the recent campaign to buy and preserve it suggested. His works are important not necessarily for their own sake or their artistic qualities, but as a trace of his life, and we watch and visit them as a way of understanding our relations with others. And his life is important for its integrity: on the one hand, his life was one with his art; and on the other, his queerness became one with his life, in his later art and activism. He exemplifies the hagiographical principle of the abstract made human.

Like the saints, he is ‘open to interpretation’: each generation finds their own Jarman, as the recent retrospectives in Dublin and Manchester have demonstrated. Jarman’s appeal now is that he was politically ‘difficult’, a word he once suggested was better than ‘gay’. Like the virgin martyrs, whose stories were retold to show models of resistance in the face of authoritarianism – the oppositional nature of a Christian politics – Jarman’s affiliation with the more radical parts of queer activism has been retold in ways congenial to contemporary ideas. That is, it is the structural characteristics of his political work and not its contents that are passed down. (The postcard from the Manchester show contained a striking text which, although it did not say so, was not written by Jarman himself. The sentiment and rhetoric was, however more in accord with contemporary ideas of queer politics than Jarman’s own writing would have been.)

The Jarman I have found is a compelling, frustrating man; patron saint – perhaps – of talkative schoolboys, consummate amateurs, compulsive lecturers, those with an uneasy attachment to tradition, to beautiful things. I look to him as someone who both makes and embodies the arguments I pursue here: as someone, for instance, who looked to historical figures as part of a cross-temporal queer community (‘I like the idea that we are linked in orgasm with Alcuin, St Anselm or St Aeldred [sic], all of whom loved men physically’); who drew on Christian visual ideas not, or not solely, as parody but as their rightful heir; who read, and made, biography as a way to assert the concrete ‘I’ of queer individuals over the ‘they’ of gays and people with AIDS as an abstract other. ‘It was very important to find the “I”: I feel this, this happened to me, I did this. I wanted to read that. My obsession with biography is to find these “I”s.’

Derek Jarman – ‘St Derek of Dungeness, Order of the Celluloid Knights’ – was canonised for his AIDS activism, and the virtues he manifested in this, his cheerful indignation and integrity. But his sainthood rests not just on this formal recognition, but on the exemplarity of his life, his authenticity – the way, that is, his life passed into his art and his art into his life, at least as his fans and detractors both see it. From an early age he manifested his special talents as a cultivator: of others’ aesthetic lives, with his recommendations for books and art; of groups and scenes, with an unstoppable gift for drawing people around him; of plants and gardens, which he brought forth in the least hospitable places. With too many ideas and too little patience to develop them all himself, like a gorse pod he burst seed all around him, passing on projects and advice, giving away his colourful, quickly made paintings as if from an inexhaustible supply.

He knew, if he did not yet understand, his desire for men from childhood, and suffered for it, punished at school, so the story goes, for getting into bed with another boy. It was only in his early twenties that he met queer men and was addressed as one himself, and only through this address – innuendo on the part of a friend’s older lover, then the more direct address of a visiting student getting into his bed – was he able to become queer. For the rest of his life he would emphasise this need for what one could call ‘formation’: an induction and acculturation led by others. Not that his desires were created by others – these were a natural response to men and boys around him – but that knowing how to relate desire to social practices, to one’s social self or identity: all that comes from others, needs to be called, by others, into being. It was his awareness of this that drove his filmmaking, where he licensed the desires of others by presenting them on screen, showed them, in the figures of Roman soldiers, Shakespeare, Edward II, that they were not the first.

In his work and his person he brought together ideas at odds. The forward gaze of the group who look to a future in which their liberation will be complete, the backward glance of those who feel they have a past, a tradition, from which they have been exiled but is theirs by rights. The life of a bohemian and a background in the most institutionalised part of the English middle classes. The creative impulses of the avant garde on the one hand and a preference for the concrete over the abstract on the other that drew him, as it did his mentor Ken Russell, to conservative genres: the adaptation, the biopic, the period drama.

It is through these tensions that his interest in biography can be understood. Biography: a genre associated with discretion and the promotion of normative ideals of family life, the glossing over of all of the aspects that make someone queer. It is queers, after all, who led the revolt against the genre so understood: Lytton Strachey’s parricidal Eminent Victorians, Virginia Woolf’s biographies of animals and bisexuals, too large for one Life. (It was the life of a queer – Lytton Strachey again, as written by Michael Holroyd – that provided a model for a new tradition in biography, writing that took sexual and romantic relations seriously as part of the life needing narration.) For Jarman, Bloomsbury were the new Victorians, cosy and caught up in their class.

Jarman’s films are helpful for a discussion of queer hagiographical life-reading in their distance from biography. What is important is not ‘what happened’, but to bring oneself in relation. His Caravaggio is a fantasy, Wittgenstein, for all its efforts at accurately capturing the voices and mannerisms of an intellectual and social world, a morality tale about sexual repression (and as such deviates from its source material, Ray Monk’s written biography). The ‘truth’ of such works, and in how we read and tell life stories, is not in whether something happened in actuality, but in whether a given story – Francis Bacon meeting George Dyer when the latter was breaking into his flat, for example, or the many myths about Oscar Wilde – captures something of the character and received ‘meaning’ of the figure, gives sharper definition to the shape their life has taken on for us in our need. (That biographies might stolidly tell us ‘what happened’ is in any case a recent requirement. And what about the way we fall in love, like Boswell for Johnson, with the subjects of biography, our own and others – the way, also, that reading lives helps us see new modes of relation and of loving.)

The truth, specifically, is their queerness, which, in the analogy with hagiography, stands in for holiness. Sexual partners, many or few or only speculative, are a generic feature of the queer Life, and of queer life-reading: Jarman, on reading Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, wrote, ‘The ghetto performs like a daisy chain, I wonder which daisies he plucked, Maynard Keynes? Anthony Blunt?’. We might think of the viral archaeological photographs on social media of men being found buried together, described as cousins or friends, reposted with knowing commentary. (Although Jarman also pushed against this tendency: ‘It seems the sex act is the way we confirm or deny our sexuality. This is not the case – it’s quite possible to be a celibate queer.’) To assert the queerness of a historical figure, certainly at the time Jarman was working, is, or becomes, an act of historical revisionism, a retelling of the given story. This, in his work, amounted to – or was intended to amount to – a wholesale rewriting of cultural history with queers at the centre: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare. And, especially in the case of those already known to be queer, and who suffered for it, it is a moral rehabilitation, as well as a political one: Jarman triggered a campaign to have a statue erected to Oscar Wilde, and more recent examples might be the eventual success of the campaign for Turing to be pardoned, or the murals depicting Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who, in the last ten years, have become the faces of the Stonewall riots.

Here, even more so, does the genre of the queer biography merge with hagiography, especially in the currently popular forms of the twitter thread and the museum wall text. It is not just the queerness that needs to be demonstrated, but also the virtue of the figure. This is a process fulfilling increasingly the needs not of queers, but of straight society, what Jarman called ‘heterosoc’. The initial impulse to invert received ideas of morality – claiming that it is not, in fact, vicious or shameful to arrange one’s sexual life outside of heterosexual marriage – ends up requiring conformity to other popular virtues – consistent decency in manner and temperament, a commitment to liberation, not racist or sexist nor an apologist for empire or fascism. Queerness, previously a specific vice, becomes a general virtue, equated with goodness tout court.

There is resistance to this: now, often, from queers themselves, insisting that we see these people as people, in all their complexity, and refusing to celebrate historical figures purely for their sexuality (see, for instance, the Bad Gays podcast, as well as the outcry over a Twitter thread on the fascist collaborator Violette Morris). This can go hand in hand with a resistance to the idea of virtue at all. Equating goodness with bourgeois, heterosexual values, goodness itself is rejected. Why must sex be meaningful, relationships long-term? If, on his death, film critics suggested that Jarman should not have been made into and treated like a saint because he had, in having sex with many men, behaved unvirtuously, then we should resist sainthood, and with it any notion of virtue, altogether. In many ways this is the argument of Jarman’s anti-hagiography of Sebastian: ‘Sebastian, the doolally Christian who refused a good fuck, gets the arrows he deserved.’

But even in this resistance an ideal of virtue remains. (On Bad Gays, the hosts decide exactly how bad each gay is.) Some aspects of a contemporary picture of virtue, particularly the integration of political positions, are specific to our time. Others are markedly Christian: generosity and selflessness in encounters with those in need; fortitude and good cheer in the face of persecution; and above all, love. Particularly in descriptions of cruising or going to clubs a picture of sex not as an embodiment of ‘eros’ but of ‘agape’ comes out. Jarman’s descriptions of Hampstead Heath in his diaries present an idyll of solidarity full of encounters that transcended boundaries of class and culture, where sex was almost secondary to a sense of the social. Here, as in later interviews, he was careful to put things in such a way that people would listen, tempering the bawdy with the suggestion that no sex could be meaningless and that even the most hurried blowjob was an opportunity for friendship.

Queer use of Christian practices and iconography has often been seen, and can be intended, as pure burlesque. But the relationship is less often rejection than a kind of reclaiming, even a revisionism: rescuing the core of Christianity from the social practices and institutions that have grown up corruptly around it. This is certainly the case for Jarman, who liked to say that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality. The reasons for his canonisation were, in the end, the usual ones: he was chosen as a figure to whom a kind of cult had already attached, important in rallying and consolidating a community; and as someone who seemed a human embodiment, despite his illness, of the ‘universal joy’ at the centre of the Sisters’ mission.

Brian Sewell, clear-sighted in his appraisal of Jarman as an artist, believed in 2014 that he ‘must be almost forgotten by everyone over 40 and quite unknown to everyone under’. Far from it. And in the meantime Jarman’s cult has flourished. (You can now buy a kit to make a model of his cottage from wood and card, like a miniature Lourdes grotto.) Among his legacies in creative terms is his interest, in English film and letters, in the I: not by coincidence are his protégés in filmmaking most known for biographical films, such as John Maybury’s Love is the Devil, on Francis Bacon, or Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, nor his contemporary commentators and heirs, Philip Hoare and Olivia Laing, primarily life-writers. (Hoare in his most recent book on Dürer is also a hagiographer in the narrow sense, giving a life of Albertus Magnus as part of his broad biographical sweep.) It is right that his shrine should be his garden, in the flatness and wind of the Dungeness shingle, a spot of life that needs human care to thrive.

The past is seen through activist eyes and with activist hindsight, in the knowledge that certain battles have been won that historical queers had not thought it possible to fight – and it is not possible to talk of the past without reminding the audience of these battles, for fear of complacency. At the same time as celebrating these aspects of the past that were previously hidden and unspoken, it uncovers the ways that they are entangled in historical injustices, in order to fight new battles in the present. Such an attitude to the past comes, however, at the expense of self-historicisation, of an awareness of the present. To acknowledge that contextualisation as a way of presenting historical objects or works of art is a historically specific form of interpretation, belonging to the present, risks weakening the gesture. But this lack of acknowledgement, in combination with the emphasis on past criminalisation and past persecution, leads to an unfortunate picture in which past and present are seen in stark moral terms, and everything that happened before is worse than now. Commonalities with historical queers are celebrated, differences are condemned, ignored or refigured in contemporary terms. These benighted people can be brought into the light: now we can see this culture properly – now it has come out of the closet. The move from private to public, hidden to visible, coded to explicit, is shown as a development, rather than merely a change of mode. This is a problem not just because the past is not let to speak on its own terms, in its own language (which may for some people not count as a problem). It is also a problem because it lets the present off the hook.

An example of this is ‘Very Private?’, the current exhibition of erotic drawings by Duncan Grant at Charleston, the farmhouse in Sussex that was the home of various members of ‘Bloomsbury’, chiefly Grant and Vanessa Bell. At the exhibition the drawings were being put to obviously unsuitable work, and visibly untrue claims were being made of them, out of the need to fit them into a recognisable picture of queerness, and to allow their recent ‘outing’ to be seen as not just news, but good news.

To say briefly what the drawings are: they are a small number of hundreds made in the 1940s and 50s, when Grant was in his 60s. The whole set was given to a friend just before Grant’s Tate retrospective in 1959. (Grant continued to make erotic drawings, some of which were published in 1989, and which are now as far as I can tell mostly dispersed and owned by private collectors.) The story is that this first collection was presumed to have disappeared for good, even destroyed. But it had in fact been handed intact from generation to generation, partner to partner, a story to which the exhibition dedicates a fascinating and moving room of portraits. The curator at Charleston knew of the existence of the drawings (indeed, I have since learnt, many of them were already at Charleston) and had hoped to show them before, but their most recent owner wasn’t sure. The curator asked again in 2020, and by then the owner had changed his mind. Now they are – in some sense – publicly viewable.

Where some of the later published drawings are sketches of specific men, drawn from life, most of the drawings on show are of types and idealised figures in elegant and improbable configurations. These are not drawings as preparatory work, or practice, or the desire to capture something or someone present, but pure fun, invention, entertainment. Drawn in biro on the backs of envelopes and shopping lists and business letters they delight in the visual vocabulary of sexual, mostly homosexual, desire and of masculine beauty, from Greek vases to physique magazines of the 1950s, via, for instance, Vincenzo de Rossi’s extraordinary sculpture of Hercules and Diomedes, transformed here into an acrobatic blowjob. They make literal the desires implicit in – or read into – representations of attractive manhood, in the way that Grant also doodled genitalia on the posing pouches of models in American physique magazines. In the drawings the formal structures of porn – near infinite variation on and elaboration and escalation of a limited set of actions – are stripped of their function: the drawings are not really that sexy, rather witty, formally interesting, visually pleasurable. (Grant once claimed, Frances Spalding relates in her biography, to be pro pornography ‘because it gives pleasure’.) Grant’s life was changed when he first discovered Edward Burne-Jones and the possibility of creating work from an ‘aesthetic point of view’. These drawings take this to the realm of sex, finding aesthetic possibility in sex and sexual possibility in art history.

The chief way that the present imposes itself on the exhibition is the seriousness of it all. These are not ‘serious’ drawings – they are light-hearted, intended as entertainment rather than as a contribution to contemporary art. They do not mean what they say. To gesture towards this quality they are described here as ‘playful’, but what we understand by the word, certainly in this context, is not what Grant would have. Art that is now described as ‘playful’ is often deeply serious about its play: it is making some sort of point, about art, or about politics or representation. It is doing something other than being surprising, ‘amusing’, carnivalesque. The diversity of race and gender in the drawings shows this up particularly clearly – the hermaphrodite as a classical allusion, the use of different skin colours as a play of forms. This is not how art is made now, and even if it were, not how it is received.

Not that it is just a play of forms to Grant: Spalding quotes a letter from the 1920s in which he envies the freedom of ‘the Turks’ to take Black lovers, ‘for in Europe it always occasioned a certain scandal’. His multiracial drawings oscillate between an interest in colour as form and in race as socially meaningful ‘content’, but their playfulness points – to a viewer now, uneasily – away from the social into the aesthetic. For this reason, where the drawings were put in conversation with works by the Black artists Ajamu X and Somaya Critchlow it was a conversation that was hard to follow, which did both Grant and his contemporary respondents a disservice. They were, in effect, speaking past one another, however much they had in common in terms of playfulness and hybridity or of motif.

This conversation between Grant and contemporary artists, which included an installation by the fashion photographer Tim Walker, drawings by the sculptor Alison Wilding, work by the art photographer Kadie Salmon, and a film of an erotic drawing workshop that had been organised by the artist Harold Offeh, was set up to add other voices to the room: a way of framing, or ‘filtering’, as the curator Darren Clarke put it, the work and of not letting the exhibition be dominated by the voice of a cis white man. (Clarke, like me, is white.) This is a way of understanding an exhibition that belongs very particularly to now. And this is a conception of voice that stands in the way of an understanding of voice in Grant’s work, which is in some ways a disavowal of voice or a many-voicedness, its practices of pastiche, citation, imitation, ‘creative commentary’, as the art historian and queer activist Simon Watney has put it, Grant’s ‘long and intimate dialogues’ (Watney again) with artists he admired. The integration of pop and pornographic images with high art techniques and allusions in Critchlow’s work are a way of creating one, politically engaged, voice, which speaks, in visually challenging ways, about Black women’s sexuality and its representation. This is not how Grant’s works speak. As in his paintings and designs, here the variety of images from several millennia of art and visual culture – the explicitly homoerotic, the implicitly homoerotic, the pornographic – are brought together to create pleasing works, using various styles and visual voices, that rely at least in part on a knowledge of art history and gay pornography. That is, they speak to a particular viewer, rather than a general one. This is part of their privacy.

This way of making art, of imitation and allusion, whether Grant’s or Critchlow’s, is one that takes a knowing attitude to its sources. It understands what they are, what their role in culture is – in some cases better than these sources do, or are allowed to acknowledge. For this reason I found the contextualising essay in the catalogue somehow unsatisfying, for while it pointed out fascinating connections between queer visual culture – nineteenth-century Hellenism, the idea of the sailor in the twentieth-century gay imaginary – and empire, and then connections between these and Grant’s work, the nature of these latter connections was not described. What seems clear is that if there are sailors in Grant’s drawings they are there as ‘sailors’, wrestlers, ‘wrestlers’, they are riffs on a gay theme that everyone already knows. These are not ‘serious’ attempts to form a gay identity, in the way of those looking to Greece in the later nineteenth century. If they are a form of self-fashioning it is in the visual playfulness and pleasure, in their encouragement to take sexuality, like art, unseriously. Offering context for content as opposed to style or mode or sensibility is very much of now, the present speaking of the present using the past. Its purpose is to alleviate discomfort – the potential discomfort of viewers, but also the discomfort of curators – as much as it is to provide information. But parts of the contextualisation seemed to ignore the present in odd ways. An erotic fascination with Black men, and their presentation as sexually dominant, is not just a feature of early twentieth century gay art. If these images make any sense to us at all, the reason is that this is our context too, this is our visual culture.

What we don’t get much of a sense of is what has changed, the ways that what a gay identity was for Grant – who, in the twenties and thirties at least, disliked the ‘self-conscious’ (as Virginia Woolf put it) homosexual scene – might be different to ours, and that art made then that in some way speaks to gayness might not be doing what we now expect it to do. For instance, what these drawings are not, and yet are here made to be, are expressions of authentic desire, depictions of particularity and intimacy. One of the participants of Offeh’s workshop talks of drawing people having sex who looked like them, a way of allowing their body type to be represented. Grant’s bodies in the drawings displayed are mostly extravagantly muscled or boyishly slim, with schematic, classical features (Watney discusses Grant’s interest in Michelangelo in this regard, the way he ‘constructed almost impossibly ideal bodies from a fixed convention of drawing with its own integrity’). More than this, they depict physically impossible sex acts, sex against gravity, penetration taking place at impossible angles. These are not the exaggerated bodies of Tom of Finland or Aubrey Beardsley (though Beardsley is visible) ­– they do not have huge erections and so on. The physical aspect that is exaggerated is the flexibility, the levity. They don’t do what a contemporary queer erotic drawing might do, in providing figures that the viewer can identify with, a slice of ‘real life’. They rely on experience only in how they flesh out – so to speak! – what is implied or could be imagined in the poses and costumes they borrow from elsewhere. They do not express love or intimacy visually – not the ones on show, at least. But making something to delight others, or an other, is already an act of love.

It is the contrast between Grant’s drawings and the seriousness, or even earnestness, of the framing and almost all of the contemporary responses that the present seems most inescapable: there is no sense given that the requirements of queer art now – that it understand itself as political, that it express certain desires and identities, that it speak from a certain position outwards, that it ‘mean it’ – are of 2022, and that Grant might be doing something different. (I have since found John Bayley saying the same of Bloomsbury per se in the early 90s: ‘our trouble today may be that because we take seriousness seriously we take Bloomsbury too seriously. … Things have come to the point where we are in danger of not understanding what Bloomsbury was all about: especially not its humour, and its way of looking at people and the world.’) I too find it hard to understand Grant’s life and self-understanding, and more generally the way of being queer that was unbothered and accepting without making of homosexuality an identity, a form of self-presentation legible to all in the know. Once it is possible to be out, the previously rich and diverse ways of not being out are suddenly given a new frame – and then, in hindsight, flattened and obscured. The ways we often speak of queer figures of the 20s now almost always look to the public traces of their queerness, or the public constraints. But the private freedoms are harder to imaginatively inhabit.

To return then to the exhibition’s title, ‘Very Private?’. This is taken from what was written (without the question mark) on the envelope Grant gave to Edward Le Bas, the first owner of the drawings. ‘Very’, not just because they are pornographic, but also because in a sense all of Grant’s work was private until later in his life: made for himself and his friends, or for private patrons, or a private dealer. That this is not the only way artists make a living now is in a large part thanks to Grant’s lover, friend and patron Maynard Keynes and his involvement in setting up the Arts Council. The acquisition and exhibition of the drawings removes them from a mode of circulation belonging to a different world, both in terms of attitudes to homosexuality and in terms of art production and ownership; a world, that is, where the social role of queer art was very different to ours. Both in 1989 on the publication of the later drawings and now, people have speculated that Grant would be glad that his drawings were out in the open. When Michael Holroyd sent Grant the typescript of his biography of Lytton Strachey, another former lover of Grant’s, Grant asked ‘Shall I be arrested?’. This was 1966. But the anxiety around Holroyd’s biography, shared by others, was less a legal panic than the sense that this changed everything, that the nature of past relationships would be now, decades after the fact, altered irrevocably, and present relationships changed too. (‘I cannot help feeling very averse to having my most private feelings of so long ago openly described.’) It required a change of understanding of oneself as a social being. Having disliked the self-conscious ‘buggers’ of the 1920s, Grant had, by the end of his life, been taken by the much younger Simon Watney to a Gay Liberation Front meeting, although I don’t know what he made of it. He came round to the biography: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better. … Everyone’s past has been revealed now, and I’m rather in favour of it. It makes the lives much easier to understand; and otherwise things would be questioned without people knowing the answer, and I think that’s a bad thing.’ The danger now, it seems to me, is of the lives being made harder to understand – of things not being questioned because the answer is presumed.

I also hoped that it would be a return to form: the project Lemmey has most recently been involved with, the ‘Bad Gays’ podcast and now book, I thought unsuccessful (I’ve written about this elsewhere). A return to form and a return to ‘form’ – because one of the things I have found frustrating about Bad Gays (both podcast and book) is its lack of attention to form or genre, its faith in ‘content’, facts, information. Ungentle tells another version of the story Lemmey and his co-author Ben Miller dealt with in Bad Gays – that gay men have often been complicit in imperial (etc.) projects – presenting it not by dutifully racing through the facts, as in Bad Gays, but, using the resources of British experimental filmmaking, as an ironic fiction.

The story is a composite of recognisable figures and types. The narrator is an upper-class, left-wing homosexual recruited by an attractive fellow-student into spying for the Soviets, then becoming a double agent. His autobiographical monologue plays over images of southern England (Cambridge, London, Hampshire), at points static, at points moving, sometimes as if directed by the disembodied voice, at other times acting in an uneasy counterpoint to it. He tells us that ‘deceit is the English game’, he drily comments on the fascination others, outsiders, have with treachery. He makes knowing allusions to historical figures and events – Guy Burgess, John Vassall, the Montagu trial, the Cambridge Apostles – and to the secrets of London architecture, all in a tone suggesting that he is over it all, that it would be rather unsophisticated to find it interesting; yet his confession is driven by a self-involved fascination with his own, doubtful, moral and political status. The narrator is voiced by Ben Whishaw (Q, Paddington, Sebastian Flyte, Ariel, Norman Scott, the young man in London Spy who finds out his lover has been murdered by MI5, etc.), whose performances express, with mannered control, a twee, sadomasochistic narcissism. The script enjoys playing with the formal parallels between homosexuality and spying – and, though implicitly, the British compulsion to ‘read’ class; the camera – an allusion to Isherwood (‘I am a camera’) – acts as an objective recorder vibrating with subjective contempt.

The film is about the ‘complicated relationship between British espionage and male homosexuality’, the angle that seems to have attracted most attention, but more importantly it is about the representation of this relationship in British culture. The main point of reference in the publicity material is John le Carré, and certainly some of the narrator’s rhetoric seems straight from le Carré, but the setting ­– interwar Cambridge, stately homes – recalled also those films and TV of the 1980s and 2000s where the complicated relationship between British homosexuality and class, power, espionage, etc. is at least partially redeemed by erotic visions of floppy knitwear on closely mown lawns, rosy young men leaning against sun-warmed stone: Another Country (1984, play revived in 2013), Cambridge Spies (2003), Brideshead Revisited (1981, 2003, 2008; one of the sections of Ungentle is titled ‘Et in arcadia ego’ in homage), A Month in the Country, Maurice, etc.

Like a composite portrait photograph – or, to be more contemporary, as if generated by AI – the film, with its uncanny recycling of types and clichés, seemed to offer little purchase for an immediate reading. The many echoes and allusions seemed there not to open out onto something, to help us see anything more richly; rather, they seemed to reflect ironically on the desires motivating such acts of allusion, of eroticised nostalgia, fascinated outrage. The script describes sex between sensitive boys and virile but wounded labourers in golden fields, undergraduates caressing between tutorials; but the only people we see are passers-by in twenty-first century Soho, unpicturesquely checking their phones. Similarly, when the voiceover turns over the stones, we might say, of Englishness and the camera pruriently follows, we are told of but not shown the hidden life that lies beneath it: the furtive handovers, the rushed sex behind trees, the violence of the SOE. I suppose one reading of all this is that the voice is describing a ‘secret’, ‘unknown’ history that’s not immediately visible in the contemporary environment, like the walking tours one can take (and indeed Lemmey himself has given for Studio Voltaire). But I preferred to see it the other way round: that the desire to pick at the scab of Englishness, and its inverse and twin, homoerotic English pastoral yearning, was being frustrated by the camera, which was providing, in Clockwork Orange fashion, perhaps, a kind of detraining.

The camera’s collaborator in this is the dislocating new summer of 2022, itself a grotesque exaggeration of the mythic, golden English summer of fiction, in which Englishness, or rather class, is upended and exposed: The Go-Between, My Summer of Love (the novel, rather than Pawlikowski’s self-adoring film of 2004). The script promises ‘bucolic’ scenes, but what we are shown are algal blooms, the stubby brown of dry grass, vibrant green and golden inverted. (There’s a – slightly overdone – shot of a striped deckchair floating in a pond thick with weed, for instance.) The script imagines lovely Englishness; the camera shows one of the eerier bits of New Forest heathland along with some mysterious and independent-looking ponies, barbed wire fences and not hedgerows, more Andrea Arnold than James Ivory. The camera lingers on a handsome Modernist beach house (built a couple of years after the events the voice is describing, the party that led to the Montagu trial and indirectly to the decriminalisation of homosexuality) and, at the end, the Solent, with two ferries crossing, as the narrator reaches a moment of self-reckoning. It’s beautiful and obscurely moving and provides in visual terms the unresolved resolution that is a genre marker of the arthouse film. I’m not sure that any of this particularly helps the film’s project, but, as you’ll see also in the essay on the Queen’s death, Lemmey is interested in being moved in unconventional situations, those attachments that we form despite ourselves, and in that sense it is fitting.

I thought there was a lot that was good about the project of Ungentle as I understood it, but as a critique of representations of homosexuality and power in the twentieth century in British mainstream culture it seemed too gentle, too easily made part of the genres it quotes. By presenting itself as a piece of ‘secret’ history it allows people to feel they are learning something new when it is, as my exhibition companion put it, an ‘old story’: something they already know, and already desire. The film delights in its own knowingness, in having the knowledge to recreate the codes and shibboleths of class; and it allows people, through this, to become vicariously inducted into the rotten-sweet world of the English upper classes, which the homosexuality and the self-loathing make almost respectable. In the end there is nothing so English as hating Englishness, as Stephen Spender said of Bruce Chatwin – ‘The British Empire, after all, was based on people trying to get away from Britain.’ I’ve tended, like Lemmey, to think that there is no way out of this and that the only decent path is one of maximal honesty about one’s own attachments; but my friends disagree and think that in contemplating and obsessively analysing this stuff, all this English business, I am rotting my brain, which would be better stimulated by Dostoyevsky, Marx, and Philip Roth.

Is deceit the English game? Is lying, and therefore espionage, ‘an English craft’? The film’s use of these ideas comes, I think, from the novels of le Carré – ‘The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth’ – although, as a friend pointed out, it also echoes something Jan Morris once wrote about Kim Philby: ‘he was thinking that there was no true dignity in the world of affairs … It was all rotten. It was all lies’. Lying isn’t really what I would usually associate with Englishness, rather omission, self-deception. But more important here is the exceptionalism (‘We are a devilish nation’) – an exceptionalism seen also in the phrase ‘normal island’, used ironically as commentary on British affairs on Twitter. A year ago I was describing my feelings of despair at the political situation in the UK to a French friend, who responded contemptuously that I and my countrymen would now have to get used to living in a normal country. At the time I found this attitude basically quite nihilistic; but as an analysis of the cause of my despair it was probably accurate.