tape

In the early to mid 1990s my fingers started to hurt. I was taping them up every visit to the climbing wall. There was something calming about it as a practice. At that time my life was so fucked up I constantly forgot to bring the scissors. But I was driven. I had to go to the wall, I had to go now, I had to tape up quietly and methodically in the changing area then work through whatever move was obsessing me, over and over again. & I had to use scissors to cut the tape. Rather than go home to fetch them, I would jog down the road and buy a new pair at the pharmacy by Mile End station. Soon I had a little collection. Towards the end of that period of confusion I bought three new pairs of scissors in a week. I still own one of them: small and pointy, nicely-made and precise, sharp after all these years. Now that I’m no longer an obsessive, using climbing as my language to describe and manage everything else in life, I’m able to recognise that taping-up was less to do with finger tendons than self-care. It was a metaphor for something else I needed, some kind gift I could only give myself under cover of snipping exact lengths of medical tape and winding them carefully round the middle & index fingers of both hands, above and below the first joint. Or perhaps it’s a kindness that can only be done retrospectively, in the act of recognition.

ghosts again

They always look the same, tired round the eyes, too old for their age, strange haircuts. They’re dressed in clothes that would have carried information forty years ago but don’t say anything now. They look like the victims of some social or political process to which, if you aren’t careful, you’ll be introduced whether you like it or not. When ghosts slip away from the crowd at the base of the statue, they first make a little eye-contact. They slip away visibly. They want you to know that they know that you spotted them. Before they go they want you to know that we’re all in this together.

the english grotesque

Lord Jim at Home probably wasn’t aimed at the faint-hearted even in its year of original publication, 1973, when alarming the audience was at its height as both method and literary goal. Its target social anxieties – slyly presented and self-mirroring – belong to the two decades following the second world war, when the fear of the managing classes was that, given half a chance, whole sections of society would break the social and cultural contract, reject the capitalist project, and enjoy themselves instead. Fifty years later it reappears in a timely edition with an introduction by Ottessa Moshfegh, someone who has done her own share of alarming the audience.

Read the rest of my Guardian review of Dinah Brooke’s seminal work of 70s Grotesque here…