Hoover Dam: Writer’s Block

Good Lord! Writer’s block is an actual thing. And it’s awful. I always imagined it as a sort of romantic procrastination that might last a few hours. The writer sits, thoughtful on the sofa, legs purposefully crossed, as they stare into the deep, navy-blue hue of a drawing room wall. After pause for reflection on the blue wall void, they take time to light a perfectly stacked fire and return to the sofa to watch a film before sifting thoughts for a gemstone in the gravel. A civilised soupçon of vino later and they’re right back at it, returning to their desk with Tolstoy at their fingertips. But it isn’t like that. Nothing at all like that in fact. Of course it isn’t. But I do love to dream...

I clearly have a lot to learn about writing. About bearing the difficulty of creative endeavours such that passion can appear in my life. Writer’s block is a paralysis. It feels as though I have quite literally forgotten how to open my computer, click on the **WRITING folder and start tapping away (** keeps it at the top of my list even when it entirely escapes action for months). I just don’t know how to do it. I can’t. I can no longer write. To be clear, I can still string words together and use my computer – I am not entirely incapacitated which would be easier – but only to write things like emails to the school confirming the veracity of the ‘no crop tops’ rule on comic relief day. That kind of thing. It’s not even a gilded cage. In these writing actions my children marvel at how fast I can go. Words, words, words and more words. But where have the other words gone? Why can’t I let them flow from my fingers in the satisfying tip tappy rhythm of the space bar two step?

I learnt to type fast as a kid using a toy designed to hone secretarial skills early because creative play lacked productivity for a child of Maggie Thatcher. I played it over and over enthralled by the wpm going up and up. I only ever truly perfected one meditation of the middle line though.

 a lad had a gal a gal had a lad (repeat ad infinitum)

Revolutionary stuff! Perhaps the advert should read, “Makes sure your daughter can type really, really fast, whilst also reinforcing a doctrine of heteronormative ownership as a mode of expression!!!” Advert or not, I learnt to type what I was told to. In more recent years I have found words of my own. Lots of them. I can thank psychoanalysis for that and my analyst who has tirelessly let me spew them up in all their disjointed ungainly mess. There are poetic moments of course but in general it is often a sort of unsatisfactory, hesitant and stumbling solo akin to the trumpet in the primary school Christmas concert. Not exactly pleasing to the ear but you come away with a sense of something in the making, a hope for a less ‘Scroogey’ kind of Christmas. Imagine that, three times a week, and it gives some idea of what it means to keep talking with an analyst week in, week out. It isn’t like the movies. After a few years this practice with words started to forge a space for me outside of the therapy room, a space to start typing differently, a different kind of spewing. This time my typing was not a response to a command for particular words at a particular speed. ‘I am free from the dream of the typing pool!’, I thought. ‘I can swim in the wilds!’ And that’s where I freeze. The problem of freedom is old hat, de rigueur for Sartre, but that knowledge doesn’t make it any easier to de-ice the permafrost.

So what’s happened? Where did my words go? I am pretty sure they’re around somewhere and will shoot up most unexpectedly. Like bamboo, you can’t kill the damn things. The underground rhizomes will always seek new ground to colonise. Some of them are squirrelled away under the ice layer in the private space of emails to my analyst. If I dare to be poetic there it makes sure to dam my flow. Damn dam! Hoover Dam! Yes. That’s what I have spent forty-four years building and its walls are as thick as… is there even an analogy? Hoover Dam is the analogy. Its walls are as thick as the concrete of Hoover Dam. The Colorado River is capable of a magnitudinous force that requires an impenetrable defence. Those walls aren’t going nowhere kid. They’re made of stone. They hold back the potential for a destructive flood that might totalise the landscape. If I write, I might destroy. I worry the waters I let into the world will not be ones that support life, but that flood it out. Saturate it. Ruin everything. But something isn’t right, these mixed metaphors are giving mixed messages. Words have appeared. There are shoots above the frost.

“Dance me to the end of L❤️ve”

Listen to playlist

🎶Hand In Glove🎶 As a lifelong romantic - is there any other kind? - I never want(ed) to interrogate love. I only want(ed) to fall in, headfirst; any semblance of thinking already drowning so that the body might thoroughly enjoy plunging into its azure, glistening pool without question. A liquid sensation that encases every cell of our outer shell. The perfect (g)love. Why dare to roll back the hand hugging sheath and risk exposing our most dextrous extremes to the icy air? To pull apart the four letters that promise an answer to it all? That would be a crazy thing to do - wouldn’t it? The trouble is, we must come up for air. Above the surface we witness the ripples and disturbance to the world without. We must pull these letters apart so that love can live and breathe with others rather than remain submerged. Underwater. We do not have gills.

Yet the Western world insists on promoting L-in-OVE as the ultimate higher state to be sought after and sustained. It is fixated on love’s azure pool and disinterested in what happens to love when we heave ourselves onto the poolside to take a look around. It preys on how good it feels to be underwater, in another world without language and words. Only bubbles. In this state we cannot do, we only are. We are powerless to love. We cannot think or speak and love rules rather than connects. We do not need more dictators on our planet.

🎶Crazy Little Thing Called Love🎶        My other lifelong obsession, pop music, has done little to dissuade me that love is the answer,  its snake-charming hypnosis oft suspending me in love’s grip. It seems I forgot to remember (sorry Freddie, see repression) all the songs telling me love is in fact the thing that is crazy, not questioning it.  You might forgive me this oversight, for the songwriter’s lovewashing is intense! A cursory look at Spotify reveals an astonishing number of albums entitled ‘Love is the Answer’. Great! says me and contemporary Western society, enthral to the idea of answers, especially one as pacifying and powerful as romantic love. Music to my ears! swoons capitalism as the conflation of love and sex, under the rubric of romance, sings its sweet serenade to structural inequality whilst its grubby patriarchal paws are deep in the ylang-ylang oil, massaging the blissful inaction.  But scratch the surface and playlists begin to read like a hopeless DSM inspired, never-ending list of love’s afflictions. ‘Love is the Devil’, ‘Love is Blindness’, ‘Love is Hell’, ‘Love is Dead’, ‘Love is a Drug’, ‘Love is Not Enough’ and a particular favourite from this short piece of research ‘Love is a Waste of Time’, which is one way of avoiding love’s complexity by throwing the baby out with the bath water. Or should I say, the person out with the pool.

🎶Words of Love🎶        If there is one word that endlessly ails us in failing to get close enough, it is love. So entrenched in its own disappointment we have ascribed it five different languages, yet why not ten or a thousand? Spotify uploads sixty thousand songs a day (almost) all about love. It seems we can no more say everything than anything or nothing about love. Perhaps Derrida was right. There will never be enough words of love to fill the gaping hole.

When we are L-in-OVE this hOle appears whOle, a perfect bubble. Blown from a child’s party toy, its rainbow tinted walls oscillate in the breeze, leaving anything other than the satiated state of love obscured by its willowy walls. We cannot step inside this floating place. We must fall and be caught there. Suspended. Inside the bubble, the world appears incandescent. We are turned inwards, caught in an embryonic singularity, with all the narcissism that might imply.  

This deeply pleasurable state is bound very tightly with the word in western culture. The four letters even look good together. Flanked by fixed, straight lines, the curvy O sits proudly at its centre, apparently holding all meaning in its reinforced spherical bubble, pulsing with potential. To produce its sound (/ˈəʊ/) a rolling tongue glides gently across the roof of a barely parted mouth, as its breathy vowel is conjured forth to the lips and met with a soft, barely-there finish. It is a seduction. Yet we destroy love’s potential by fusing it with sex and pleasure. We must not be so seduced if we want to harness love’s power rather than float weightless in its elixir of bliss. For love to be a force for connection this inert, merged state needs air. The bubble must settle on earthly ground where its walls give way to the world’s nitrous complexity.

When the bubble bursts, we find a hOle at the heart of lOve. We do not find holes in words so satisfying as bodily orifices. They are unsettling. But we need unsettling. We do not love very well in 2024.

We try to plug l ❤️ve’s hole with symb 💍ls. Pictures do not lack so fiercely as words, and in the space of one letter we have an indexical litany of meaning for the illusive iconicity of love. But these meanings collapse in watery, concentric circles or are gathered up under social structures commandeered by patriarchal capital. Marriage for the Romans was not connected with romantic love but their (incorrect) anatomical link between the fourth finger of the left hand and the heart, formed the first stars in our contemporary constellation of the family and normative ideas of sexuality and kinship, which are used as forms of control and oppression. Love is ringfenced. That does not mean marriage is not valid. But it must not be used to ringfence love when one or another person, or groups of people, or alternative societal structures and forms of love can be pushed outside or trapped within. Violently negated.  There is nothing with such power to destroy as disappointed love. Nothing breaks like a heart. It is a luminous hatred.

🎶‘…like a heartbeat drives you mad’🎶 Since the early Greeks the heart has been considered the affective centre of the body and is a universal symbol of love. Sappho’s fragment 31 describes her heart’s fluttering response and a simultaneous ‘broken tongue’ when overwhelmed by love. In this collapse of language, confusion of senses and destabilised heartbeat ‘I seem nearly to have died’ she chants.

 The heart is integral to life and death. It is a pulsating (in)glorious mess of electrical energy and tangled muscle that ceaselessly pushes on regardless until life ends / death comes. Over and over and over. It takes no prisoners. Love has the power to mess with its rhythms. It pushes and pulls, it arrests and flutters, it skips in gaiety and anxiety. It misses beats and destabilises patterns… duDum duDum duDum, DuDUdum DUM DUUDum, DUDum, duDum duDum duDum… Bigeminy. Trigeminy. The disruptions take our breath away.

🎶Let’s Dance🎶 How do we weather this bodily storm and find a new beat in its wake? One that dances with others to the complex warped aphexian rhythms of the world around us. One that does not obliterate an interest in anything or anyone else, consumed with hanging on to its own limp beat, oblivious to the tempo of others and planet earth. We must find ways to transition from the primacy of our silent disco love bubbles to an altogether more communal and global rave.

🎶Both Sides Now🎶 Like the power of love, the power of music is not one dimensional. It does not only offer a suspended inertia but can be a transforming force. Joni Mitchell wrote her songs to ask questions. Her unique guitar tunings became known as ‘chords of enquiry’. The beauty of her work is not in pinning love down but in opening it up. Offering new partial perspectives. In her seminal song ‘Both Sides Now’ Joni sings ‘I really don’t know love at all’. Her not knowing about love is a relief. A different kind of musical contentment from the lost-in-love enjoyment she so often describes ‘where pleasure moves on too early and trouble leaves too slow’. ‘Help me I think I’m falling in love again’ she pleads on the 1974 album Court and Spark; though she resists his accusation, I wonder if Joni partly agrees with Richard’s perspective that ‘all romantics meet the same fate someday. Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café’.

🎶Dance Me To The End Of Love🎶 Leonard Cohen’s somewhat sinister elegy ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ fell into my thoughts as a chord of enquiry one rainy drive home from therapy. I have often wondered what happens to the post-session bodymind when wrapped in music’s swaddling blanket. Like love, music can be an anaesthetic, but this does not necessarily preclude the effects of the cut. Sometimes an anaesthetic is required for an operation to be possible. Is transference not an anaesthetic of sorts? The thing that makes pain and loss bearable. Listening to the first song that comes to mind in the liminal space of the drive home has sometimes been fertile ground for me. It might be one lyric or a vague feeling that inspires the song. It is sometimes a song I know very well and sometimes a distant fragment of musical memory I am compelled to seek out. I have no idea why Leonard Cohen’s song came to mind. I had not heard it in a few years and did not know it well, yet the words and mood of this deathly ode to love resonated wildly and I drank it in with a desperate thirst. Sometimes we need something to wash down the bitter pill of words in order they be metabolised. Analysis is not about understanding or even believing what is said. The words must find a place in the body, be taken up into a state of being.  Immersed in this song, I became subtly aware that my idea of love was being danced to a kind of death. Not set fire to in a burning blaze of glory as Cohen (and Jon Bon Jovi… and come to think of it, me) might romanticise, but worn out somehow. Danced into some new kind of relation.

When Freud cites psychoanalysis as a cure effected by love in his 1906 letter to Jung is this what he was alluding to? The transferential dance that uses the exceptional energy of the LO-in-VE state to inflate a bubble until it fills the room, a balloon fit to bursting, so that it might be let down gently, the escaping air danced out, transmuted through the rhythms of speech, where the power of love is used to transform both love itself and our relation to others concomitantly.

Is it in using the unparalleled power of love to transform love where psychoanalysis might find its unique place in the difficulties we face in the world? How might we persuade ourselves that in executing our dominant ideals of love, not holding on to love so tightly, not leaping to ‘love is the answer’ without letting it breathe, we might unleash a love that holds an unthinkable power to intervene and transform. Where we are failing to make changes at the level of language and law, we need new forms of activism. Do we need a new kind of love song? A new kind of protest song? A love song activism? One that anesthetises us to the pain of coming up for air so we might let the bubble burst and give love new ground.

 “No childish expectation. Love is not the answer, but the line that marks the start”

🎶For You🎶 Laura Marling (2020)

Cover, artwork: I never asked to fall in love, Tracey Emin (2020)

"So long as no-one is hurt…”

Chris Packham’s urgent, intimate and political appeal in ‘Is It Time to Break The Law?’ (Channel 4) is profoundly uncomfortable and rousing viewing.  A necessary and landmark piece of television where politics and the deeply personal are vividly intertwined. Reviewed as “beyond merely thought provoking” (Jack Seale, The Guardian) Packham wrestles with his frustration that a life’s work as a conservationist has fallen on deaf ears and urges us to find new ways to act as, his desperation laid bare, he seeks to do the same. Perhaps it is in the face of his vulnerability that I feel able to expose myself and raise my voice publicly in writing for the first time. Psychoanalytic ideas offer a perspective that is underexplored in mainstream media and so it is here, in this (re)quest for new ground, that I feel compelled to share a perspective and response to his central question “Is it time to break the law?”. When, like Packham, we seem to be going round in circles, psychoanalysis can offer an interruption, a space for something new to emerge. And we must find something new. We must interrupt this deathly inertia.

“Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety” (Freud, 1930 “Civilisation and Its Discontents”)

Packham is at times dumbfounded by the brick wall he is banging his head against. The programme opens in silence, his face in close-up, an opaque curtain of thick oil slowly obscuring his fixed gaze. An arresting and somewhat grimy spectacle, culminating in his open mouth filling with the excess. A deluge that drowns all previous words into inky silence and leave no space in his oleaginous cavity for new ones to emerge.  He later describes a depression taking hold after Cop 26. Perhaps this is what his depression looked like. Faced with too much, he sank beneath it, neither able to see or be seen as his words lost their grip, powerless to make an impact in society’s slippery, oil slicked terrain.

Presumably he, at least temporarily, managed to wash away the blackness because for the rest of the programme he talks to us, and other people, about finding an act that might set these stalled words into a new kind of motion. Packham does his best to do away with the idea that there is some ‘beyond’ where the action will happen and dedicates himself to an exploration of what he and we can do to unrest the political stagnation. His eschewal of the ‘beyond’ is critically important because it lands a powerful left hook square on Capitalism’s thus far unbreakable jaws. And let’s be clear here, any fight for climate action is a fight with Capitalism, its intrinsic relation to power and the apathy born of its delusion of somewhere better to get to. Some-thing beyond to aim for, some-thing just out of reach, is a tenet Capitalism absolutely relies on. For Packham and many others living apathetically in delusional hope is impossible. We bear witness to him repeatedly asking himself and others how far he and they should go. He scrubs away at the question, interrogating ideas of the law, morality and ethics, and challenging the efficacy of the familiar, peaceful activism he has dedicated his life to. The depth of his struggle to countenance more antagonistic action is palpable and is wrought out in a series of reflections and interviews. “I got my first pair of binoculars in 1970” he recounts, pleading with us to see the horror up close like he does, desperate to find a way into the indifference. One of the remarkable realisations of the documentary is Packham’s lack of immunity to the powerlessness and submission Capitalism demands. One might expect his status as a celebrity and white man, revered in his field, to protect him somewhat from coming face to face with the same horror of immobilisation we witness in the other activists he passionately engages with. But this is not so. Whilst Capitalism stays true to its patriarchal power structure, it suffers no fools. There is no get out of jail free card for those that fit the bill but won’t stand in line. Capitalism has no lack and so nothing to defend. It is indiscriminate in its zero tolerance for anyone that opposes its regime.

Watching the programme left me with the uncanny feeling we are living in a real-life sequel to John Carpenter’s ‘We Live’. This time round, we all have the glasses, binoculars in fact. The two-faced political game is playing out right in front of us, magnified in all its g(l)ory but some people, most of us, remain resolutely blind. So what is it we don’t want to see? And what is it that Packham can’t do? The interview with Conservative Peer and Chair of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Peter Lilley is excruciating. I want Packham to physically fight this fuckwit into submission in a scene to rival the film’s legendary tussle, but life isn’t quite like the movies. At least not yet…

All this apathy and refusal begs the question of what is just so difficult to encounter? We don’t need Packham’s binoculars to witness the footage of floods and fires, to see people losing their homes and families, or to know about the devastation of the coral reefs and other lost species. We’ve all seen the news, heard the political spin and shed a tear watching Attenborough on a bleary eyed Sunday. But the horror of all this destruction we can see doesn’t seem to factor. There must be some other horror at stake. One that is quite literally blinding, binoculars or no binoculars. For this we must look elsewhere.

The relentless drive for more, for excess, for the illusion of immortality and power is perhaps where the horror really lurks, buried deep in the environs of the vulnerability underpinning this quest. Whilst there may be some truth in saying people cannot bear to acknowledge the potential of humanity to destroy, it leaves what cannot be tolerated elsewhere, ‘in humanity’, as if it is not us. It is what the alienated subject can’t abide about themself that really matters here. Capitalism’s super egoic reign demands a repudiation of vulnerability and along with it the hatred and aggression caught up in this perpetual blind spot. In order to love, and to connect, both of which will be central to a radical change of position in regard to Capitalism and the climate crisis, we must come to terms with our hatred of our vulnerability. If not, the hatred will just keep on keeping on, killing off everything in its wake.

The focus of Packham’s enquiry is whether breaking the law is necessary. He is deeply conflicted by this particular point but perhaps it is not the law as such where the intensity of his struggle lies. Whilst the line of the law may well be a critical threshold, I am left wondering about his internal hard line, that which marks a boundary of his aggression and terror at potentially hurting others. As he uttered his parting words (or is it Channel 4’s caveat?) “so long as no-one is hurt… then you’ll have my support” I felt crushed by the impossibility of his request. No wonder he is so anguished. 

I am not suggesting Packham’s action should take the form of wilful violence to those who oppose his views (though the thought of Lord Linney being roughed up a little does, I admit, do it for me) or that he should disregard hurt that is caught up with any action. But that there must be an acceptance there will be hurt and a sense of responsibility for it. It cannot be disavowed as someone else’s attack. We must take responsibly for attacking society as it stands, from within, to open space to form new bonds and learn to live together again. To act means to act in relation to others. Even lawful action can have deleterious effects. Packham interviews one of the Dartford Crossing climbers imprisoned for three years for ‘significantly affecting people’s lives’. However much we need this chaos to interrupt the ennui and recognise the horror of this imprisonment as immobilisation of power, the judge was not wrong in his summary. The activist’s serious action, in the face of a serious situation, most likely did cause some people serious harm. A harm that cannot be shoved elsewhere, away from the place of action. But one that is endemic to it. To act is to affect. Perhaps someone was prevented from getting to the bedside of a dying parent. Perhaps a child was subject to domestic violence in the absence of a carer. Perhaps someone couldn’t get the urgent medical care they needed. And perhaps all these people were climate activists too. But there is real pain and real hurt that can come from even the most intentionally peaceful action in a quest for protecting life. There are no innocent bystanders. We must all be culpable participants. It is something we must learn to accept as part of the fight for change.

And the climate emergency is now a fight. To enter the fray is to know that people will not only be affected but seriously hurt. We know this because people are already dying from the physical and mental impacts of this crisis; from floods, fire and suicide. The stakes are very high. People and animals are being displaced from their homes. They are being forced to give up everything. They are in pain. And there will undoubtedly be much more pain and loss. If we refuse to acknowledge this, then we will be paralysed from action. We are all vulnerable and share our human capacity for hatred and aggression. This is what we must get up close to, so that it does not wreak havoc without witness and responsibility.  By failing to see the hurt caught up in peaceful action we are inadvertently playing right into the stasis. The bad guys remain the bad guys. The aggression is perpetrated elsewhere. And so critically the hurt remains elsewhere too, in areas of the world and marginalised communities that do not factor as immanent to us or our action. The abandon with which we have let animal species die out is testament to this hierarchy of vulnerability. Something Packham is undoubtedly all too aware of. This is not discreet from that of human life but part of the same continuum based on power relations.

And so we must all be stopped in our tracks and faced with both our vulnerability and aggression. We won’t like it. Some of us will shout and hurl abuse at others. Some of us will try to turn it in on ourselves to negate its horror. But we must refuse these tactics and come to realise our propensities. We need to expose our vulnerability because only then will others be able to witness their own. It won’t be easy. We will not like it. We will fight back or cower in the corner. But we must stand firm. Most of us want to believe we are the ones being reasonable, that at heart we are peaceful. We must eschew this image in favour of a less salubrious savage in order to find a more harmonious existence alongside others and our ailing planet. Perhaps for many of us, the powerlessness and anger is rising to the surface. It certainly seems to be something Packham is wrestling with. But for those at the very top of Capitalism’s army the illusion is harder to dispel.

Sunak’s devastating U-turn on climate legislation was announced the morning after Packham’s programme aired. The Guardian blog headline read “wishful thinking for Sunak” (Chris Stark, Chief Executive of the Climate Change Committee) but this is to miss entirely what Sunak wishes for. He wishes for economic growth and to remain content with the all-powerful image patriarchal Capitalism furnishes men like Rishi Sunak with. If growth is his cake, then net zero is eating it. He might publicly nibble at the edges to give the illusion of enjoying it thus satisfying Capitalism’s bid that we can indeed have it all, but the truth is he doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite for anything that might mess with the cut of his jib. Or suit. And to eat it would be to suggest he has a hunger when Sunak is always well fed, with eyes only for the excess beyond.

A ‘net zero growth plan’ is quite literally a contradiction in terms. As his U-turn confirms, it is one or the other. The issue is this choice requires loss - money or the planet - and loss is a word that does not feature in Capitalism’s or Sunak’s vocabulary for it exposes vulnerability. Perhaps Sunak believes he will eventually gobble the cake enthusiastically but by then it will be too late. It will be past the ‘sell by’ date. To label Sunak’s decision making as “leading from the front” (Conservative Party leaked what’s app messages) is laughable given the form his power seems to take is that of a little puppy wagging its tale to Capitalism’s manic tune in return for a hypnotic mirage effacing vulnerability and bestowing power.

The stream of adverts in the commercial break of Packham’s programme were a shocking addition to this question of power I was already wrestling with. Hiding in plain sight as the premise of four commercials in a row, were all the makings of Capital’s hypnosis. The angle? The power of the consumer. Each advert hysterically presenting an illusion that the people are in control, that they should get what they want and not have to give anything up, not have to pay. The big corporations satisfied with merely serving a demand. This is the very tactic that pervades the refusal to wake up to our vulnerability and aggression. We are getting what we want. We are giving others what they want. We are all happy and in control. No-one is suffering. No-one is losing. Everyone is winning.

The Tesco advert shows a man gleefully zapping away at his clubcard to reduce the shopping bill. He finds himself unable to engage with the checkout assistant because he is uncontrollably breaking into song. The connection with another human severed by maniacal outbursts of Snap’s iconic “I’ve Got The Power”.  The man looks possessed and the shopping assistant offers a bemused expression as the tagline “Feel the Power to Lower Prices” fills the screen. It seems it is important we no longer think of Tesco as “Every Little Helps” for it would suggest too much of the vulnerability at stake and precarity of the power relations at play. This must be obscured in the realms of what is a collapsing Capitalism. One that is at risk and pushing back even harder to resist ruin. The Shreddies commercial offers the same thing. A hypnotic voice chants the affirmation “You are strong. You are unbreakable. You are uncrushable. You never flake.” It’s tagline, “Shreddie for anything”.

Except we are really not ready. Not even slightly.