Originally written for: 2011 Trees for Life Charity Exhibition.

With skin so soft beneath the bark
And resin coated hair,
The freshest sap runs through her veins;
She is always there.

Never sleeping, ever true,
She answers every call
As, one eye hazel, one eye green,
She watches over all.

When winter storms are raging
Or the night seems far too long,
She suffers on amidst the gales,
Resolute and strong.

And in the spring of morning,
When all is calm once more,
She will still be standing there,
Steadfast as before.

For whether auburn, scarlet, burnished gold,
Pale green or richest lime,
This mother of the forest waits
Until the end of time.

To see more of David’s photography, visit his website here.

I rarely feel strong bonds to people I have never met, especially not those who were dead before I had even heard of them. Yet the other night, I got this lovely image in my head of the late comedian Bill Hicks and the late writer David Foster Wallace sat in a bar together drinking and laughing. I found this a very comforting image. I think they would have been good friends. Both were very funny people in their different ways, both were very spiritual people in their different ways, both were profoundly courageous moral thinkers in their different ways. Slavoj Zizek wrote that film directors Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky had offices in the same building towards the end of Tarkovsky’s life. Yet he writes that: ‘Although the two directors had deep respect and supreme mutual admiration, they never met, but carefully avoided each other, as if their direct encounter would have been too painful and doomed to failure on account of the very proximity of their universes’. My feeling is that Hicks and Wallace would not have engaged in this paradoxical avoidance strategy were they to have crossed paths. They would have got on. They would have got drunk and put the world to rights in between tears of laughter. They really seemed to care about people. From their hearts. This seems to me to be so rare. I remain deeply touched by both of them. I feel something like love for them although strangely enough this is rarely motivated directly by their artistic output, so much as the details that emerge in photos, interviews, biographies. Two tormented souls struggling to find love and compassion in a cynical and inauthentic world. I feel so sad that neither are still with us. Yet the image of the two of them giggling like children over a beer in the corner of a smoky Texan bar fills me with utter joy. And sadness.

Ellen Book awoke with a start.

Her hand shot out, the lamp switched on.

The shadows were chased back to the edges of the room.

The closet, behind the curtains, under the bed: they hid from her, as shadows like to do.

Even though she was safe in the light, those terrors that get inside still danced fresh within her mind. She held the covers safe to her chin, and calmed herself down, and thought about returning to sleep.

Had she done just that, maybe things would have turned out differently. Whether they would have been better or not, though, remains to be seen.

Ellen was twelve, enjoyed reading, and was bullied at school because she was an easy target. She always thought of a good comeback long after an insult, and she always blushed and said nothing when it did happen. Nobody touched her or hurt her, but their words stung like sticks and stones, and she had shed many tears this past year.

“You’re a book!” was a favourite insult, with someone having noticed she liked reading, and her name was also Book. It was stupid, and childish, and they were always saying her name and noticing her when she wished they wouldn’t.

She didn’t want to be a little girl, any more, and her boy-band posters had given way to rock groups, her books were less about adventures and more about tragedy and doomed romances, her stuffed toys hiding under her bed where they didn’t remind her of her age.

The worst thing, though, was when she did make a friend. Melody.

Melody slept over, and went for a drink during the night.

Then she told everyone what freaks Ellen’s parents were, and that was the end of that.

But right now, Ellen was scared, and she wanted to be reassured.

Her father was away on business, and her mother worked late, too. But Mum Book usually worked at home, down in the basement, where Ellen rarely went when it was dark.

Yet, tonight, she wanted someone to tell her everything was okay.

Her feet slid out from under the sheets first, tentatively, worried that something in the shadows beneath her bed would grab her ankles. She touched the cool, prickly carpet, and quickly moved away from the bed. She turned and looked at her bed.

Nothing moved in those shadows. If there was something there, it was patient.

And that made it much, much scarier.

Ellen edged her way towards the door to the landing, and reached an arm out into the darkness. She quickly felt for the light switch.

Clck!

The light came on, and she stepped out.

The stairs were next. The light switch for the living room was at the bottom, so she would have to journey down into the darkness.

Her first step made the floorboards creak a little, but as she went further down, the only sound was her soft steps, and her breathing. Everything else was that silence that sounds like nothing, but hums in your ears, anyway.

As she neared the foot of the stairs, she could see blue light coming from the windows, and the hulking gloom that coated the sofa and the arm-chair. Black murk, thick and impenetrable, hiding horrors in her head.

There was a small bit of yellow light gathered around the basement door, beneath the stairs, but it didn’t extend far.

Ellen reached the bottom of the stairs, and reached behind the coats that were hung up, reached for the light switch, knowing something was hiding there – a spider with a baby’s face, or the hand of a serial killer, or a slime that would dissolve her hand and work its way up her arm.

Clck!

It was even worse.

The lights didn’t come on.

Ellen turned, but couldn’t see very well.

Did she want to see?

Clck! Clck!

The lights weren’t working.

She stiffened, and then calmed down. Her mind was panicking, but she told herself that there was nothing there. She didn’t believe it, deep down she knew something was there, but she told herself, and repeated it. It was a mantra, and with enough repetition, she tricked herself into thinking it was true, “There’s nothing there, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there…”

Ellen moved quickly, for the safe zone of the yellow light on the floor, and opened the door to the cellar.

The yellow light was on the wall by the stairs, but the basement itself was black.

Why?

Ellen knew her mother was working down there. The lights should be on.

The yellow light hummed a little, and the hum hung in the air, as if to punctuate the silence, “!”

The walls by the stairs were a menagerie of monsters. There was a man head being melted by acid, and you could see his skull. There was an alien creature, sleek, black, with soulless eyes and sharp black teeth. There was a portrait of a family that had been murdered, the paper yellowing, but the eldest son’s face kept blurring, and twisting, before mutating into something demonic, and then turning normal again.

There were scythes, knives, bear-traps, and limbs, torsos, severed heads.

There were pictures of people covered in blood and smiling.

Then there were the film posters beside them, showing from where these props had come.

Ellen was about to step down onto the first step when she saw a hand reach into the yellow light at the bottom.

She heard breathing, and a pained groan as the hand tried to drag itself forward.

There was the wedding ring her mother had let her try on, once. The edge of a red shirt her mother was wearing. Those grey-blue fingernails.

And blood.

“Huh… huh… hel… help…” came a tired plea, struggling to escape dying lips, barely heard.

Then, the hand vanished.

Yanked away. Sudden.

There was nothing.

Not until Ellen heard a sound from the basement. It was a clakclakclak sound, but something about it she heard as being a voice. Something was talking.

She shook, and felt like she was going to wet herself.

The word, “Mum,” formed on her lips, but went unspoken.

Tears prepared to flood her cheeks.

Then, from the murky living room behind her, came the reply.

Clakclakclak!

She didn’t realise it then, but the only thing that saved Ellen was that she didn’t care what waited in the shadows, she wasn’t curious or brave, she was a scared little girl and she ran.

She ran through the darkness.

She unlocked the door.

She left her home and ran for the neighbours.

And she would always be running from the dreams of shadows, and the cellar, and a hand reaching out of the dark, for the rest of her days.

To see more of David’s photography, visit his website here.

It seems that as a society we do not take boredom very seriously. I recently went to a conference on the theme of boredom, and when I mentioned it to other people, most of them chuckled. “Was it boring?” was the standard response. Fair enough. For most people, boredom as a mood is of a similar status to minor moods such as frustration or awkwardness. It does not hold the same status as moods like depression or happiness, which keep academics and self-help gurus busy. And yet David Foster Wallace, referred to by many as the greatest mind of his generation, has just had his final unfinished work, The Pale King, published posthumously. It is a book about boredom. Why would such a great mind be so focused on boredom? Wallace even went so far as to say that: “To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”. This is just a preliminary piece to try and place boredom in context. I hope to expand upon this theme, looking at questions like: what can boredom teach us? Are we living in an age of boredom? Is boredom a ‘pathological’ mood? Is boredom a taboo subject? I am hoping to explore some books and movies that touch on the theme of boredom in order to try and make my own ideas clearer to myself. I hope shortly to submit a few thoughts on a book I am reading at the moment called The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It is considered a boredom classic!

Written 25 April 2012

Fernando Torres broke his long-standing goal drought last night, scoring Chelsea’s winner in a crucial European match. It was interesting to hear the discussions afterwards on the radio. Apparently some psychologists had suggested that his goal drought may be ‘fatal’. It seems interesting that psychologists feel able to make such comments. Their opinions only have any authority as they are supposed to be scientific (psychology is, after all, the science of mind/behaviour), but it is difficult to work out how scientific the claim that Torres’ goal drought is ‘fatal’ can be. As irrelevant as much of what psychologists say in the media can be, there do yield plenty of power. What if Torres had heard a supposed scientific expert tell him that his goal drought may be fatal, that he may as well just give up, that it is basically all over for him? This may well have led to a self-fulfilling prophecy and only lowered his confidence levels and expectations of himself. We can see similar things in the field of mental health – professionals have often suggested that certain forms of mental health problems are chronic or incurable, in effect ‘fatal’. This must have a devastating effect on people who are told this (numerous patient narratives suggest that this is the case). Many contemporary accounts of recovery from mental health problems force us to question these rather pessimistic statements. The thing that troubles me is that statements from experts, especially scientists, have power to shape how we think about ourselves – experts increasingly have come to govern our souls, to use Nikolas Rose’s phrase. Fortunately one suspects that Torres would not take too much notice of such nonsense, but I find it troubling that such statements continue to be made by people who make claims from a supposedly scientific perspective. Psychologists, psychiatrists and other similar professions wield great power in determining how we think about ourselves and each other. Yet there is good reason to be suspicious of much that is taken to be scientific orthodoxy. Robert Whitaker’s recent book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, is an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism that exposes the corruption and deception at the heart of the modern psychiatric project. Ivan Illich suggested that we should take less notice of professionals, that we should de-school society. People may find it re-assuring to have professionals guiding their decisions from the cradle to the grave, but I find this quite depressing, especially when most it is bad science. Torres’ goal last night made a mockery of opportunistic psychologists offering their supposedly scientific perspective on the fatality of his goal drought. Yet most of the rest of us probably care a lot more about what scientists tell us about ourselves than Torres does. That’s the worrying part of it.

To see more of David’s photography, visit his website here.

The wind pushed through the gaps in the old house making eerie sounds and demonstrating real power. Cobwebs fluttered in the face of it and dust settled in its wake. There was no one there. Spiders hugged the walls and two mice ran along skirting boards. But no one saw them. The ragged curtains trembled either side of the small window in the scullery. No one shivered. A door from one of the outbuildings was partly off its hinges and creaked with depth as it moved involuntarily to and fro.

The traveller leant against a stout tree trunk and tried in vain to light a cigarette. He looked the old house up and down. He scanned its breadth in the scant light from the moon. He had the measure of it. To him it was stone and wood and turf and twisted metal. Clearly no one was inside. It would seem that no one had been there for a very long time. He wondered how long. He carefully picked his way through tangled garden to the door and attempted to open it. It was not as difficult as he had expected and so he entered more quickly than he had anticipated. He left it wide open.

Slowly and gingerly – not wanting any injury from random obstacles, the traveller looked around the little house. Here a rotten wooden cupboard with fragments of linoleum still lining its shelves, there a small table, white with age, and, everywhere, signs of a hurried evacuation. No food – the small inhabitants would have finished that off fairly sharpish – but crockery and pans in small numbers showed the traveller where someone had cooked and eaten a very long time ago. He lit his cigarette and watched as the smoke mingled with the cloud of memory that hovered there. A loose flagstone came between him and his exit but, instead of walking around it, his mind was jumping in and out of the stories he had read. He remembered people trapped in cottages such as these. He remembered such places coming and going through years – places like Brigadoon. He remembered Silas Marner, George Eliot’s weaver, who had hidden his money as he had hoarded it. He began to work his strong fingers around the loose flagstone. With difficulty he lifted it but found nothing underneath. He put back the flagstone and laughed at himself. He became aware, however , that he was not alone. He looked behind him, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling with something he did not recognise. There was no one there.

“You didn’t find it.”

The traveller looked up to see a young woman standing in the open doorway. She wasn’t standing very still. She seemed to be swaying but in a curving sinuous way.

“No. No – I didn’t find anything.”

“And, should you have found it, would you have kept it?”

“I – didn’t know – didn’t know what I was looking for.”

“They never do.”

“Who never does?”

“The men who come – they never know what it is that they seek – but they are all seeking something.”

“I didn’t come here to find anything.”

“No, you didn’t, but there is something missing for you and you feel an emptiness.”

“How do you – - – - – ”

“You will not find what is missing here. Go back and it will be waiting for you.”

“Where?”

“Where did you come from?”

“You seem to know all these things – you tell me where I come from!”

“You come from earth and it is to earth you shall return – but that which you are searching for is not of the earth. Go back and you will feel it.”

With that, the woman turned and it seemed she was blown along through the garden with the dried leaves and clumps of dead vegetation.

He was alone and wondering. He lit another cigarette and walked around and around the old house. It gave him no clue. He wasn’t good at taking advice. He was stumped. The wind was less aggressive now and seemed to whisper to him to leave. He closed the door behind him and stood on the path, taking in the night. His feet led him back the way he had come. It seemed the debris on the way through the wood was blown aside ahead of him. The trees coughed and croaked to him as he walked on and soon he felt a part of it all. Close to the edge of the wood he sat down and breathed in the night. The night breathed in the traveller too. And so they were one. A man whose life had been bereft of spirituality had been admitted to the spirit world.

They found him the next morning when two of the rangers arrived to fell marked trees. They told their story for a very long time. The man they had found had died peacefully and with the most wonderful expression. But the story doesn’t end there. The tree which had been his last earthly resting place was one of the marked trees felled by the rangers. As it passed through the neighbouring trees, to land on the floor of the wood, a cache of acorns and hazelnuts scattered from a crevice within its trunk. They became covered with leaf litter and settled into the earth where many germinated and developed into saplings and then into trees, breathing life into this world – life and spirit.

I am thirty-one years old. I seem to have reached a stage in my life where I am struggling to find meaning in a lot of things that once seemed so important. Not all things. I do not feel depressed, but rather I am finding that in most crucial areas of my life, things just do not feel quite right. I am often bored, and if I am not bored then I am busy and distracted, which is basically the same thing. So I guess I am trying to connect/re-connect with those things that nurture and feed my soul. I like words like soul and find it (along with others that are increasingly under attack by scientific materialism) comforting and important. Lots of people and ideas nurture my soul, while others do harm to it. This blog is an attempt to explore these people and their ideas. I hope to focus on the former much more often than the latter! I also hope to explore some personal ideas and experiences so that it is not exclusively about other people and their ideas. I look forward to seeing how it shapes up and what directions it will end up going in. I feel very excited about writing it. It is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. For some reason, I am at last ready to do it.