Footnotes to a blank text.

# in which space & time are discovered to be deeply inconvenient.

I became a carer because of T. Or, to be more precise, because of T’s location relative to my mother’s location. His cottage could only be reached (after a 10 minute car journey) by walking down 3 steps, walking along a pebble footpath punctuated by concrete stepping stones (constituting a pretty pathway, I suppose), down another 3 steps, up another two once you had arrived at the (usually open) front door, around a corner into the kitchen, & then through, down another little step, into the circular conservatory.

It was not a journey my mother could manage alone.

But perhaps I mean I became a carer not just because of the relative locations between T & my mother (neither of whom were moving anytime soon), but because of my location relative to the both of them. However you examined the conundrum, my habitual spatial co-ordinates on the planet were a good deal more removed from the relatively, albeit taxing, distance between my mother & T. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of space (& therefore time, it seems) between me & my mum.

So perhaps this means I became a carer because of triangulation. I choose this word because of its closeness to the word strangulation. But having done a bit more reading, I realise there might be many better nouns. But for now, I am sticking with it. I remember coming across the word when reading a book about Mercator. Even then I did not understand the properties of triangles, & I am a bit shocked (maybe with a wry, raising of the eyebrows kind of emotion) to discover that triangulation has a completely different meaning in psychology, to do with a toxic relationship between 3 persons.

And although this may seem a touch abstract, & irrelevant to the 3 bodies involved in this part of the story, this stuff does seem to form part of the fabric of the reasons I became a carer, which I am trying to collate & understand.

It seems to me ridiculous to suggest that my decision (I deliberately introduce this intention-laden word here) to become a carer has anything to do with the huge & ancient & modern scholarship about the nature of space & time.

But still, I am interested. I am flabbergasted to learn that so much discourse was generated about spinning buckets containing water. I am discomforted by the fact (if that is what is) that space is no longer considered a container. But I am not surprised to learn that a body such a mine causes a material space to curve around it. After all, it seems to me that were I not in existence, the space would fill the space where I am no longer, & my body is hardly geometrical.

I remember, for instance, screaming at a cold dark night sky, when my brother died. Where. Are. You. Now. Pete.

And I came to realise that not one of those words made sense when speaking of the dead. We do not, not at all, have a language for the dead. They can’t tell us either, & that seems to be the nature of things (if things is the right word), as Marilynne Robinson noted. (1)

My brother may not be interrupting the spatial stuff of curves & the sort-of-maybe indecisive particles of which he was a part, any longer, but my mother certainly was, albeit slowly. Or, I mean, I think, more slowly than many. (Though I leave out the plant kingdom, naturally, where slowness seems to help a lot, but it would not be helpful to contrast my mother’s difficulty with moving to those tiny motions of a birch, or an oak). It took me 25.37 seconds to move from the car & into T’s cottage. It still does, more or less. But for my mother, with my help, (her left arm hooked into my elbow, her right supported by a stick) it took us about 10 minutes. As time went by it took us longer, & longer. Towards the end the terrain had to be traversed using a wheelchair. So time speeded up, but not in the sense that things got easier.

Getting back out of the cottage was a lot more difficult than getting in. I did not have the strength to pull the wheelchair up over steps. Down, albeit bumpy, was possible. Which is, I suppose, something to do with the gravity the physicists are so interested in. Whatever it’s curious nature, I was experiencing the practicalities of its effects every Saturday.

So, I return to the conundrum. I became a carer because of T, & I tried to explain this by considering space & time. These are, after all, supposed to be fundamental to our understanding of the nature of things. I could also have added in the nature of the terrain, the topography, I suppose, of that journey. Certainly, it seems to me, space & time had something to do, in an explanatory way, with how I wanted to unpack the sentence, I became a carer because of T. It is difficult, but these concepts, or do I mean practicalities, were the first to come into my head. I don’t know why.

I think space & time can only be part of the story.

2.

# in which the particularities of the human body come into consideration

I could not have become a carer, because of T, were it not for some particular neurochemistry in my own head. It is still the case, it seems to me, that I became a carer because of T.

But the causation here is not clear. To have helped my mother across the terrain to T’s cottage, given how far away I habitually lived, at the frequency with which she demanded, required a set of improbable albeit actual circumstances to have been the case. I will try to explain.

A lot of stuff goes on in our heads, as neuroscientists are very keen to point out. And a lot of stuff, given contemporary mapping techniques, goes on in our heads at particularly intricate places & times. So, mapping in space & time, it

seems, all over again, but restricted to some stuff in our heads. That is quite a small space, or should I say lack of space, given the lack of room in there, filled as it is with neural tissue & blood & other critical matter for the functioning of the brain. I have read that this object in our skulls is the most complicated thing (if that is the word) in the known universe.

So, when you think about it, all explanations, whether about my mother or T or myself, should stem from here, even when extricating the facts about why I became a carer, because of T. Well I have said it was because of T. But I am examining causation. Maybe I am wrong, & the nice sentence does not convey the truth of the matter.

And then I am onto another question, given my ruminations about space. Are there spaces in our body, or are they full of this ludicrously intricate stuff, with no gaps at all.

But I digress, as usual, it seems. This, I think, is irrelevant.

But no, some part of my brain is not irrelevant to this investigation.

I do not even now know what part of my brain was involved in this. I will leave that to the experts. But some time before it became apparent that my mother could not manage the journey to T’s alone, I had become ill. Or, to put it slightly more succinctly, I was informed that I was unwell. My brain had become infected (I suppose this much was agreed upon, although our languages differed in the specifics). I could describe, in much detail, what I thought was going on, but the bottom line seemed to be that my head contained too much dopamine, & not enough serotonin. I seem to remember that I have drawn a picture of the dopamine molecule, but how that helps, I don’t know. A image of a neurotransmitter does not convey much information, at least in the way this supposed excess affected my life. At any rate, whether it was this florid surplus of a molecule I had never heard of, or the effects on my body that other, perhaps more complicated molecules, designed to stop the former docking, as it were, in my head, well whatever the causation, I could no longer work, in that normal sense we associate with labour & the money we get for doing it. 

It was not as if I was doing nothing. During my long holidays in hospital ( I use the word holiday not because it was fun, & planned, but because it became a complete excision from the normal world, in the way that some think that travelling to a completely different set of spatial-temporal co-ordinates is enjoyable, provided they can get back, of course), I started doodling.  It calmed me down, &, on balance, I was not calm about the turn of events at all. The results were visual, not textual. The analytical side of stuff was no longer a part of me, after all.  So, I was not doing nothing. But, on the other hand, I was, in effect, in normal parlance, doing nothing. 

So, one way of accounting for the way things turned out would be to say I became a carer, not because of T, but because of  D, that molecule in the head.  

But, nonetheless, I don’t think that explanation quite does it, for me. That excess of a molecule may have enabled me to become a carer, but I don’t think that was the cause. Were it not for T, I would have had to become a carer, dopamine excess or not. 

These reflections have gone on enough. I became a carer because of T. This seems to sum it up. But let me add a footnote into the body of this text.

I came down from the city, full of ideas & my understanding of practicalities. You can’t do this anymore, mother, I said. There are other obvious solutions. Yes, she sort of said but didn’t really. So we arranged for the final visit to T. In his kitchen, she said to him ( with me steadying her with my arm):

“Thank you for all your hairdressing, Tudor”.

She had tears in her eyes.

That is why I became a carer.

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(1) In Gilead, the father, writing the letter to his son, tells him that by the time he reads this, he will be gone a long time: “I’ll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I’ll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things”.  I just so fervently wish the dead had a postcode. 

Footnotes 2

# in which a point becomes a line

You do have to start somewhere (a spatial term I should perhaps delete) or at some time. At some point you have to start again, with a point that can turn, (via, probably, the mechanisms of neurochemistry & body parts, involving some baffling causal relation between the thinking parts & the eyes, watching, & the hand, doing, making symbols) into straight lines & curves that can be understood by some other being, similar, (genetically I suppose we believe) to myself, whatever that self might mean.

It is a matter of fact, I believe (two, or probably three concepts that have generated a vast amount of literature) that once the writing starts the unconscious mechanisms of neurochemistry & neurophysiology, in any event (another word with such a dense history), it seems to me, Take Over, & I have no idea (another concept, like the others) where this will end up. It is certainly true (oh god, another of those words) that when I start drawing lines my head seems to make decisions about my hands (its eyes watching), with no conscious explication accessible to that being I call myself. (1) I sort of think, afterwards, that the aesthetic decisions my brain is making are akin to the colossal gaps in our understanding of what is going on in this world, or on this planet, on which we find ourselves. (2)

Writing is not drawing, this is a conventional distinction: on the art planet, it is the book-producing distinction between text & image. But there are also the perhaps insanely important distinctions, between thinking inside a head, using speech to repeat what was in the head, & writing down what you thought was in it. It is slightly frustrating, but when you think about it, the ludicrous intricacies of what goes on from ideas in the head though to the larynx & then ALSO onto paper. Well.. How is any of it even possible.

(The difference between thought, speech & language: I am aware that many many many peoples have investigated this, the qualities, the evolution thereof, blah: of course, I know this. But I try to allude to that distinction that you can notice without, totally without, the assistance of theory: the differences you notice when trying to express the thought through speech, or, or &/or, writing. I KNOW, I know, so much has been written. I just want to say that you only have to experience it, by doing it, that the gaps, the holes in the transition from mind to matter become so dark, & infuriating.

I am trying, just now, right now, at this point, to decide whether it is permissible to think, to speak, to write, about stuff like thought, & speech, & language, given that so much has been thought, said & written about thought, speech & language. The temerity of me, I realise, comes to sit next to the emotional state of reluctance (if reluctance is an emotion, perhaps it is an absence of activity hidden by a secret, & maybe the secret is very secret) about which I wanted to write about, which makes all of this a preface constituting an attempt to explain why I do not wish to write about what I need to write about.

This image was made under a constraint.

And this was made under another.

Both images were made under the same more general constraint. I was obsessed with two landscapes in Wales, & subsumed them under the concept: Hairy Building On A Hill. This concept was to be explored, using only small pieces of paper & some ink pens. So far, so conscious. But my head had other ideas, & what appeared on the papers seemed to me to be other, possibly related concepts, not invented by me. The first image here came into existence after many attempts to catch the emotion, or atmosphere, I suppose, (I think the concept of the uncanny was in play) (3) behind the concept. The second image came into existence because of an intervention by a friend. He drew a small rectangle on the top left hand corner & told me to work with that. If you look closely I believe that, despite my attempt at the erasure of an alien hand, you can see the impolite & outrageous invasion. But my head reacted to it, & a form of straight line geometry came about, very different from those curves in the first drawing.

Which brings me to the point upon which I have been very reluctant, I now realise, to expand : the point, becoming language, which was supposed to be a continuation, in a literary sense, of chapter $1.

The second chapter was supposed to start like this:

# in which certain particular movements of the hand can express a charming interest, or an unpleasant contempt

It was to continue like this:

My mother said, just the once (& I cannot forget it) , whilst licking her right forefinger to turn, with joy, the page of one of the innumerable (well, there were many, but not infinitely many, of course not) gardening booklets & magazines that popped through the letter box, periodically (I now realise, seasonally) that these booklets, containing images of botanical creatures that could be ordered through the post (life, through the post!!!) , that these booklets were the reason P (my brother) left for X (a tiny island floating in the Atlantic).

And this:

Hmmm, I said, FLICKING, rapidly, using mainly my thumb, through one such booklet, I can see why.

But before I can even begin to explain why these words could not come into existence, due to a reluctance on my part which is in itself difficult to explain, I realise, with horror, that in that other reluctance to use proper nouns in a geographically normal & explanatory way, I have uncovered an extraordinary ignorance of the relationship between land (in this case an island) & sea (in this case a large amount of it, completely surrounding it). DOES this island float? DOES IT? It is not a question I have considered asking of a large landmass, it just seemed to be a natural verb for a tiny island: float. In the back (back?) of my mind (I am getting a touch too aware of spatial words for the non-spatial workings of it) I think I am thinking of that short story by Melville, about remote islands. There is a strangeness left over in my memory of that story, & I think it is that prominent juxtaposition of Ship, Sea, Remote Island, but most particularly the image of a Ship, which has allowed my head to conflate floating with islands. And now, I realise, yes, to my horror & with consternation, that I do not know whether islands float. This ignorance is fascinating & fabulous & a digression about this ignorance is hopefully it’s closure but is generating many images in my head. Ancient memories of geology, of the search for compressed dead animals, volcanoes, tectonic plates, orange & brown & chalky layers of sediments & rocks & soil in diagrams, the crust of the planet. And still, with my image of a tiny island, I can not decide whether it has, as it were, a stalk underneath it going down to the centre of the earth, or, just a little bit, so that you could swim under it.

Hmm. I now reason, if you could swim under it, it would be moving around in the currents of the oceans. It would not stay in roughly the same place. How would you find this ancient mythical isle again? An image of the Albatross comes into the head. I am enjoying my exploration of these undiscovered & strange, yet beautiful, vacant, floating islands, inhabited only by black rocks.

So, I am thinking the verb to float is not the best one to use about an island with a known dimension & a steady latitude & longitude (Mercator pops into my head again), but the imagery remains, & I will try to capture it, with lines that cannot be read.

The diagram does not come close to my imagination. But it is a first attempt. Perhaps I can tell a story about this lost island, with all that wealth of literature about loss, & discovery. Again, I am reminded of Melville, & of Columbus, & also, it appears of that book about the invention of the shipping container, & of Pegasus, a container ship that dithered around the coast of China, its owners trying to decide whether it made financial sense to dock, given the imposition of tariffs.

But after this digression, I return to my reluctance to write about what, from a logical point of view, I should write about. Chapter 2 seemed to me to be a necessary, yet unpleasant telling of the character of values. Already, I have indicated, in parentheses, what I mean. For if the first chapter revealed me to be a person of empathy then I needed to explain that although I have compassion, I am still very uninterested in how hair looks. The hairs on the head. My mother used to say that hairdressers were some of the happiest people in the world. Why, I asked. Because they make people like me very happy.

To vomit it out as it were, to redress the possibly perceived surfeit of compassion, & concentrate on the deficit with respect to shared (that is, not shared) values, I never cared about hair, & still do not. The fact, as became evident, that my mother considered the appearance of her hair a matter of great importance was completely unintelligible to me, & my unexpressed fury about it needs to be expressed here. It was the same with the gardening catalogues, as my brother realised, not by saying as much, but by getting away from them, a long long away, as it turned out. As to the catalogues, I made a decision. It was a very conscious decision, a proper one, in other words. Are YOU interested in gardening, I was asked. Nope, I said, but I have decided to become interested. The end of that non-existent chapter was to reveal that, firstly, it did not take long to get interested in the life of plants. Secondly, I was made to acknowledge to myself, after some time, that I had values I did not even realise I had. To have different values to my mother, & to silently, & furiously, & secretly hold her values in contempt, seems to me to be inexcusable, albeit understandable, perhaps. The fact that we have values inside us that we do not make transparent made me think that the hidden beliefs we have about what to do on the planet, with the concomitant actions, is a hideous fact about us that has led to no end of deeply unpleasant unpleasantness, leading to war & hatred.

And that is why I did not write that chapter. It is just too horrible to accept.

---

(1) As a reminder to myself that here is a topic which requires consideration, the idea that there is such a thing as the New Unconscious, about which much has been written recently, seems to me to be absurd, no matter how interesting. Did anyone ever think that you needed some form of knowledge of the apparatus of the body to carry on, living, breathing, digesting, excreting, making babies. All that stuff that bodies do without being in the slightest interested in whether we have the words for what goes on.

(2) A story about epigenetics wants to burst forth here, but in the interests of what I hope to be clarity, I shall refrain from going on about that here. 

(3) I would rather use the German word unheimlich, the word Freud used. The German word carries with it a darkness, about being lost, which the uncanny, in English, does not carry. English speakers could joke or smile about the uncanny, a German speaker would not smile. There is a darkness around the word which prohibits it. A very dark, empty, isolated building, looking out (the black windows) over a black sea & being shaken by a howling wind & heavy rain. That does not tend to make one smile. On the other hand, the invention of the uncanny valley in robotics does seem to indicate that the word can now carry a creepiness after all.