Month: January 2018

I had a wonderful experience last night.  “Don’t fence me in” is the title of a documentary film by Charles Maplestone, see page at Malachite Art Films. The British Library hosted a first public screening last night and early evening, in the hell of the London rush hours, I cycled across a drizzly and cold London from Roehampton to to the BL to get to the showing and was richly rewarded for my determination as the film is lovely.

The BL cinema isn’t huge but it was packed, I think there were probably 250 of us there but I was tired from my riding around and slumped near the front so perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate the size.  I was struck, the second time this week, by how old most of my peers at something were: I saw two late teenagers and a few 20ish folks but at 60 I think I was around the lower quartile of the age range!  I guess that makes sense as Fay Godwin was born in 1931 and died in 2005 and it felt as if many people who had come to the showing had known her and I guess she had an impact on many of us between about 1980 and her death 12 years ago.  I first bought one of her books (Islands with text by John Fowles) back in 1980 and I’m amused to see that the book was only two years old when I did.  Watching the film last night, so many of her photographs were immediately familiar to me and I’m intrigued, on searching my shelves quickly, to find that I don’t seem to own any more of her books (shame on me). Similarly, thinking through the exhibitions that were noted in the film and show up in internet references I can find, I don’t think I went to any of them (more shame).  So how is her work so familiar to me?

I think she has had a lot of publication in collected exhibitions perhaps but I’m a bit at a loss to answer my own question there and determined now never to miss any retrospective exhibitions that come up and to start collecting her books where I can afford them (apparently first editions of Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence, which she did with Ted Hughes are now very costly collectors’ pieces so I can forget that!)  However, I think it may be that her work speaks so deeply to things I believe in that every image of hers I see, perhaps even when I may not have known it was hers, burns deep into my visual memory.

If you don’t know her work then I think the best way to get a sense of it is to go to the BL’s archive of her work That gives a sense of her genius with both people and places.  It doesn’t (yet) appear to make available her later colour prints which were almost absract (and which I hadn’t encountered before last night).  I wouldn’t bother clicking on the images there to enlarge them as they’re all stamped across the enlargements with three copies of a BL copyright statement.  I think she might have had very mixed feelings about that.

There are two layers to my deep, gut/bone pleasure in having seen the film (and having bought a couple of copies!)  One I think is that she was simply a genius with cameras and, unusually I think, both with portraits and with the landscapes. I think her landscapes are portraits too, portraits of land and the makeup artists who ever lived in/on it and impinged on it.  All that is dear to me and captures images that seem to me to be particularly important to capture.  However, watching last night I realised that the other issue is in the title: “Don’t fence me in”, and how much that imperative, let’s give it its proper punctuation: “Don’t fence me in!” matters increasingly to me.

Let’s start with the imagery and its genius.  One theme in the film, and coming across well in the interviews with her, and filming of her giving interviews and seminars, was that she came into photography from family snapshots.  There is that that simple intimacy in most of her work that is there in good family ‘photos: the photographer and subject are known to each other, there is trust and no worries about audience or property rights intrude on the recording.

I think that same intimacy is there in her portraiture but even in her most stark photos of the most barren bits of the UK: these places are family to her. Another aspect of what makes her special is that she was interested in how photos stood in relation to one another and in relation to words and to ideas. She was more a book and exhibition photographer than a single shot photo-reporter or all that her portraiture started in that single shot tradition.  As she gained confidence (I suspect) she created ways to work closely with writers and poets on the books she did, and she had the ability to wait and wait and wait to get the right image, with the right implicit stories for the viewers to take from it.  (She would wait for months as she describes for one glorious shot of a copper beech tree, completely naked in the depths of winter and reflected in the water below it, or again as she described for another photo of the white cliffs of Dover made completely white: utterly smothered in snow).

I feel she waited for the light and detail to be right as we might wait for the right tone, accent and staging for a really good Shakespeare play or any classic that can have multiple incarnations.  As we might wait for someone to read a poem in way that really does it justice.  There was a splendid short sequence in the film as the camera moves around a photo of hers (almost spuriously) where the sound track is someone, I am guessing Ted Hughes himself, someone with a glorious northern accent, reading the poem that goes with the photo in their book.  The poem is brilliant to start with, but spoken so well, in that voice, it sort of washes over you and hammers you in a way that I reading it, silently or aloud to myself, could simply never capture. The poem is short, one verse, a minute in the film, but I’m reminded of the experience of being part of a landscape as a storm batters over everything in sight. The storm, like that voice, hammers home an experiential moment into a sort of wedding: you now take each other, for ever, well, ’til death does wrench you off the globe; you will never exactly be the same again, and that setting won’t either, it will always remain enhanced in your memory by the whole experience.

So many of the places and people she took were intrinsically striking, “photogenic”, deserving memorialisation of each moment, but when Fay Godwin got the right moment, the right angle, the right focus, frame, contrast, they are celebrated, not just captured.  That’s genius and one particular theme in the film was that she recognised that the scenery of the UK that she caught is human scenery, as much shaped by from decades to millenia of human impacts and co-dependency, as her ‘photo is shaped by her particular choices with the camera (and the subsequent selection of the one negative to print, she took a very high number of negatives for any one print she used) and her choices in the dark room (or later on the digital image handling software and digital printer, even though she seems never to have given up starting from film).  There’s something there about the respect for our, sometimes puny, sometimes horrifically brutal, impacts on our countryside: even if there’s no animal more human than a sheep in her ‘photo, the shadows of humans in the walls, tracks, just the shaping of the land, are always there.

There’s a remarkable mix of the lonely and isolated aspects of human existence against the universal and ecological in all that.

So that’s my attempt to catch something of how the ‘photos move me and stay with me.  Now what about “Don’t fence me in!”  Fay Godwin became president of the Ramblers’ Association (1987-1990) and is clearly credited with having done much to help campaigns that led to “right to roam” legislation.  Another of her books I thought I had was Our Forbidden Land (1990) which is a superb invective against how much of the UK is in private hands, particularly in the hands of our military and our hereditarily wealthy.  Our “rights to roam” and any real equity of access have a long way still to go, nearly 40 years on the fight against excluding land ownership.  Take last year’s example: Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course destroying sites of special scientific interest. I think Fay Godwin’s passion, though focused on the land, was also about every attempt to fence in people’s thinking, she resonates with writers who don’t want to be told what to think and who invite their readers to roam with them (or to reject that invitation).

This burns with me though I guess cognitively rather than simply perceptually, expertientially.  Why do so many of us appear to want to be told what to think?  I think we need people like her, and so many of the brilliant writers she caught, to remind us that dry stone walls, even some fences, are certainly vital to live well with other animals and each other, but to remind us of the need for styles, gates, rights of way.  This was, and is, as true for the maps and places of the mind as it is for the those of the land.  We should all fight for is the right to think for ourselves.  I don’t believe in fighting for it to the point where we start killing each other, arguing lightly that our freedom to think gives us the right to kill others is to fundamentally abuse the real issue.  However, I’m damn sure we need to fight with words for our freedom for all our ideas to roam, to roam anywhere as long as it’s not simply in order to impinge on another’s thoughts. There’s a profound differences between the freedom of pacifist anarchism and equity from the “freedom” words of neo-liberals who really just want to fence others in and protect their own wealth and diktats.

Thank you Fay Godwin for so much beauty and passion, and thanks to the people who made the film, and made its showing last night happen.

One week gone of 2018’s 52.  One of my new year resolutions was to try to keep this blog going a bit less erratically than I have been doing. Shouldn’t be difficult: set the bar really low and I should be able to jump it!

Something that’s been swimming around in my mind this week has been how much I yearn to use maths, typically statistics, accurately and well in my research work. That’s not the whole of my approach to research. For years now I have been sure that most of the really important questions about psychotherapy and mental health will be most usefully explored by qualitative methods. I can see, with an almost mathematical logic and clarity that it’s only a small subset of issues and questions in this, my chosen research area, that are really usefully explored quantitatively.  As I’ve recognised this I’ve been slowly expanding my familiarity with qualitative methods and using them more and I’m loving that.  However, there remains this comfort, an almost tangible warmth, sometimes a huge buzz of excitement, that comes when I feel I’m using quantitative tools well, or even, all too rarely, extending our quantitative toolkit, honing its edges or tweaking some of its tools to give them new uses, wider application or sounder foundations.

I know this yearning and those feelings go very deep.  Too often my longing to be sure I’m getting things really right slows me up and sometimes it really paralyses me. That’s one cause of the backlog of work I’m hoping to shift as this year goes forward.  Having said that, I know that many of the things I will no longer do, things I will no longer accept, really are methodologically, logically, plain wrong. That means I can’t simply dismiss my getting stuck as obsessional or perfectionist.  However, I know there are roots here in insecurities.  Enter Frances Tustin.

One nice spin off of my obsessionality is that I have, erratically, accumulated my own “bibliographic database”. That’s transferred from one computer and software system to another over more than 30 years now and it tells me that it was nearly 27 years ago that I first encountered Frances Tustin.  From my notes it seems that was at a presentation she gave to the St. George’s Psychotherapy Department on or around the 15th of June 1990. That’s nearly half my life ago!

She was talking about her ideas about autism and some psychosomatic problems.  In my usual way, easier then when I was less overloaded than it is now, I went from her talk to read her books voraciously.  Thinking back I remember that she altered her ideas as she worked with more clients/patients.  She worked both with children with clearly very severe autistic problems but also with adults who on the face of it didn’t have autism and many of whom I suspect wouldn’t now get this increasingly widely applied label of “on the spectrum” (the autistic spectrum).  She picked out the need some people have to rock climb and though I think she was the last person to be found on a difficult pitch on K2, she clearly had a deep sympathy and understanding for the need despite losing a good friend who had died mountaineering.

She argued that some of this need is so deep the whole “neurotic” label, i.e. that there’s a vulnerability, a painful twist in the psyche that nevertheless doesn’t put someone seemingly outside most peoples’ understanding of perception and logic (the “psychotic” level), doesn’t cover what’s going on.  She argued that the need is a life-or-death one deep inside the psyche, embedded in the unconscious.  She believed that this was similar in the apparently not sick mountaineer the life-or-death need the autistic young boy felt who clutched a particular hard toy (a model steam engine or train as I remember it) so hard into the hand that it reshaped his hand so the bones were moulded to the corner of the toy.

She felt that the need to hold the rock of a cliff face, and to reduce life and death to one’s own skill and strength; to the solidity of the rock; and to the luck of not being knocked off by rock falls, was vital to some.  To resist that yearning, to be deprived of that opportunity, might leave them shells of themselves.  I think she made the link with numbers and maths. I’m not sure she was familiar enough with computers but it’s there too.  I have known ever since reading her that to me this makes sense of some of my yearning.  I’m 60 now, pushing 61 up soon and it’s still there, perhaps it’s even stronger than it once was, now I no longer have clinical work or teaching salving some of this insecurity.

So, this year I think the challenge is to enjoy the pleasure of it.  There’s a real parallel here with rock climbing.  I spent much of my childhood and early adolescence up trees when home in Warwickshire, or up cliffs when on holiday in Llantwit in South Wales, and I loved that.  I had a real shock as a clinical medical student, I would have been about 21, when a friend took me first rock wall climbing in London and then on a mountaineering club trip to the Peak District and I suddenly realised I was a truly third rate climber and had no stomach for being any better at it, nor for the risks and insecurities of the whole enterprise.  This must have come a year or so after a similar experience as a pre-clinical medical student when I realised that my double A “A-level” maths may have meant I was decently competent at maths by general population standards but that by university maths standards I was mediocre and would never discover anything mathematically new nor even follow what the top students could understand that comes down from the work of the truly gifted mathematicians.

Those were blows but I’ve continued to bumble along in the quantitative methodology realm and I churn out some good stuff from time to time.  Similarly, at 40ish my wife got me skiing and oh boy are mountains wonderful, even if you’ll never be a natural skier nor mountaineer.  Just enjoy what you can do eh?

Spanish hills/mountains in the early morning sun 7/9/16!

2017 was a funny old year from my point of view.  I didn’t redo a real cycling pilgrimage which was right; I gave up being an employed academic after only one academic year in which that had been my sole job, that too was right; I did clear a bit of the research backlog that has accumulated in some very slowly accelerating landslide, over the last decade or so, that was a start; I even got my head around some statistical theory and practice that I hadn’t known before, that was good; I did manage to kick out a few papers but not many; finally, I did manage to be moderately useful around the home and we have moved a number of overdue household things on which was very good.

Externally, globally, politically, I think 2017 was little short of a nightmare with the idiocy of Brexit grinding on almost unbelievably and Trump, Putin and, more lately, Kim Jong Un have made macho posturing and terrifying real oppression and shameless discrimination newly naked and dangerous.  There have been good countering swells and these remind us that no one dangerous person ever inflicted horror on the world without active and passive connivance from many others.  Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter more generally have given me some hope around discrimination by colour, and the pink hats and later in the year #metoo underlines that anger about, and resistance to, sexism is (re?) finding voice.

For all the good things, that felt like a pretty grim balance sheet and particularly because the basically statistics of rampant 21st Century capitalism, “free market”, neo-liberal ideas, and the grip they and their believers have on power and money seem hard to counter.

So coming back to the selfishly personal: I find myself making resolutions for 2018. That’s not something I do most years and as I cooked some up, I came to realise that it’s probably something I do only when these rather arbitrary date/year pivot points align with a yearning for more change in my own life.  Not one of my resolutions has been political I realise now, perhaps one should be tacked on: to get to the end of 2018 able to make some useful political ones for 2019.  For now … enough already!  Very best wishes for your own new year, and for any resolutions or hopes and aspirations anyone reading this has for 2018 (and for whenever you read this!)