dying to be someone
by uzwi
Competent or not, the other four-year-olds were aggressively in charge of themselves: they did up their own coats. I let an adult do mine, so I could remain preoccupied by the colour of the buttons. At eight, I was staring into ponds, bemused by the way there seemed to be more clarity in the water than in the air. I became lodged in the moment and found it hard to move from one state to the next. By eleven I could imagine myself grown up, but only as someone who, reaching some undefined gate-level, had flipped into a completely novel state. Adulthood would happen to me, but not because of me. Unlike my friends I had put in place no strategy. Meanwhile, my parents and teachers were panicking. I was perfectly intelligent but if I carried on not connecting I would end up digging ditches. I reacted to that as an imposition. Arriving in their eighteenth year, no one could have been angrier, more confused or more directionless. One Sunday afternoon I stood at the side of the Lutterworth Road in the rain and stuck out my thumb. I was facing north. In two hours not a single vehicle stopped, but as soon as I crossed the road and faced back the way I had come, they were queuing up to take me home. I was relieved. I got a job in a hunting stable a few miles up the A5. Seven pounds a week. Shovelling shit was the nearest thing I could find to digging those ditches. With my first pay I bought objects I hoped would define me. A Dutch blanket, an ashtray with horses on it; a Ronson cigarette lighter. I was dying to be someone but I didn’t know how.
the m john harrison blog 
I’ve read this straight after Tim Etchell’s depiction of being stuck, or lost, in his own improv Q&A performance, and I feel raw, flayed. You don’t need novels when you can read blog posts like that. Tim’s piece struck so hard because it was describing what I find myself doing in so many interactions – not interacting, just listening, or half-listening, watching the moments go by, almost gleefully abandoning each opportunity for intervention or progress simply by not taking it.
And then this. “At eight, I was staring into ponds, bemused by the way there seemed to be more clarity in the water than in the air.” Yes, absolutely, and no one else ever seemed to get that. They still don’t. “Meanwhile, my parents and teachers were panicking. I was perfectly intelligent but if I carried on not connecting I would end up digging ditches.” But did you ever feel it was them who weren’t connecting with you, rather than the other way around ? Everybody else’s panic always left me bemused. And, oh, oh this, “I was dying to be someone but I didn’t know how.” Not dying about it anymore, but still don’t know how.
The delight, of course, of Tim’s and your work here is that they are utterly yours, your experiences, your words, inexpressible by anyone else in that way, and yet piercingly expressive of that kind of experience for so many. And so, somehow, both comforting and flensing at the same time.
Hi Robert. Thanks. It’s kind of you to write that.
One of the things I love about FE is that whole effort towards emotional directness (often staged as a queasy pantomime wrestling bout with its various contemporary opposites, get-out clauses & sly alibis), which is so thin on the ground in the genre I’m used to. In a repertoire that seems so precisely designed to debilitate the performer, Quizoola! always looks particularly exhausting. Interesting to see inside Tim’s head under those conditions.
The same’s true of Lara Pawson’s determination to find some sort of truth to tell at her Unstrung blog.
All the time! But now I wonder. Who has right of way in these rites of passage ? They fucked me up, but though I felt like the victim, I actually gave as good as I got in terms of emotional damage. I was a disaster area & I admire the courage of people who felt they should try & bring some aid & order to it; they could have built a fence round me & walked away. (I did.)
have you ever felt that to get to your place of artistic shape the path you took was crucial in the sculpting of that shape? I remember not going the 0obvious route in learning certain painterly things-even though there were well worn (and beautifully used by other artists) ways. As a result I arrived at my particular place in a particular shape with tools that I had invented. I know it sounds a bit obvious after the fact–but often there is a journey presented/expected that has little sculpting abrasive powers to recommend it, only directional expediency. I watch what Lara does and I am reminded of that, and encouraged not to stop.
Ambiente Hotel, Notebook, and Unstrung are my three first stops every morning, without fail, and for precisely those reasons: emotional directness, directional expediency (great phrase, thanks Mia), and ‘determination to find some sort of truth to tell’ (the sheer intensity of which in Lara’s blogging sometimes makes my chest hurt). Quite frankly, the three of you give me the – well, not courage, or will, not exactly – the [FILL IN THE BLANK] to go on… The point, I suppose. My daily question to the waking world, the question that grumbles away and always breaks through, is: “What’s the point ?”. So I read this, and Tim, and Lara, and I remember.
Mike: might not ‘bringing some aid and order to it’ also be a way of building a fence round it/you, and then not walking away ?
I was going to write this: ‘I don’t know what to say, other than to warn that I should not be put in the same line as M John Harrison and Tim Etchells. They’re in another league. These kind comments make me feel like an imposter, a fake, in disguise as something I don’t even recognise myself.’ But I then feared it would encourage more, and I’d feel worse, and even more squeamish. But I also felt it would be fake and ‘outside’ of me were I not to say something. I am, as I said elsewhere, just a big clumsy bird who makes a lot of noise.
But moving on, if I may: I was thinking about this blog in bed this morning, as another hadeda crashed about upstairs, screaming and shouting chaotically at its partner, and I heard a voice. It said, in a deeply British learnéd male voice that has occasionally puffed a large cigar: “Yes… M John Harrison… We knew him as James Connelly when he was up at Oxford… One of my finest students, that one…” And then I roared out loud with laughter, cackling with the hadeda, wondering who really is having the last laugh here!
perhaps, if we all extend a hand lftwrd, we could help relve, in a perfect crcle jrk, our sense of how wonnerful we are….. or am I alone in finding thus just another “FE” moment of being trppd in a roomful of clever-arsed 80’s undergraduates???