Biology of the Worst Kind

Confessions of a Spiderphobe

This is a Diary piece in the latest LRB, the rest of it is at www.lrb.co.uk:

Autumn looms darkly and terrible in my life. From midsummer I start to worry, and by late August I am filled with dread. My arachnophobia has ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes spiders to wander into our houses – confused by some sudden indefinable but compelling ache in the forefront of their small minds – in search of a nice warm dark corner to nest (don’t think about it), ushers in my personal annual festival of anxiety and horror. Not that I felt secure during the other ten months of the year. My ex, having been my ex for some years and grown tired of being called out in the middle of the night to deal with a spider, gave me a blowtorch, which I used with desperate abandon. It’s a professional version of the hairspray and lighter technique, more or less likely to have resulted in my charred remains (oh God, and the daughter, the cats, the occasional lover . . .) being found in the smoking ruins. But death was never a worse alternative to being in the same room as a spider....

Apology for Histrionics

It's really only a sore ankle and a bit of excitement, the fall downstairs.  Kind folk have read the last post (how appropriate) and emailed me.  I am ashamed of myself.  There's writers for you: self-dramatists and attention seekers.  And leading such boring lives that a tumble downstairs rates as something happening.   Consider me sad rather than bad.

Soda Crystals and Psychopaths

Struck down with a vicious bug.  What you get for dissing publishing and capitalism.  I don't believe in this germ stuff.  My mother used to put soda crystals and large amounts of Dettol in my baths to get all the nasty little germs off me.  Though I suppose I was the nasty little germ she was trying to wash away.  I believe soda crystals are used to clear drains.  Her other use for Dettol was cleaning the lavatory bowl.

Anyway, three days in bed with my bug (lack of soda crystals probably) and the world has physically disappeared.  Unless you count reading the paper (655,000 deaths during the war in Iraq) or watching television which I totter downstairs to watch and ruin for the Poet by coughing just when the pathologist lifts his head out of the corpse with the vital clue, or the psychologist announces that this kind of psychopathic murder could only have been committed by...cough cough cough...Luckily the whole point of watching TV is to see which of us can figure out what is going on and whodunit before the credits finish, so we guess that this kind of psychopathic murder could only have been committed by a psychopath.  We watch CSI (only the Las Vegas version), Law and Order, Wire in the Blood (last night), Midsomer Murders, Morse (but not Taggart, there are standards of a sort) with rapt attention. 

Insides of bodies and insides of minds are, I suppose, all that there is in the world to fascinate us (I guess the origin of the universe has its moments).  Peering into bodies, getting corpuscle-eye views of what exactly happens when a bullet rips through the human envelope, watching ex-living people being butchered for internal investigation gives us a sense that we really do have all that stuff inside us and that, for now, it's intact.  Not the hollow men we feared ourselves to be.  It's quite a restful and heartening narrative compared to the other one about minds.  The parade of serial murdering crazies every night on TV is for what?  To persuade us that we are not crazy?  To make us less worried about being dull of mind and life (never mind, it's better than having an interesting mind that requires the rape and killing of young women/men/mothers/left-handed cellists).  Or, which is probably nearer the truth, it's just basic narrative.  Someone does something, someone has to find out who did it and why.  It's pure and uncluttered.  And the further the mind of the killer is from the bog standard normal mind (you know the one you and I have) the more we can sit back and enjoy the story.

Ordinary everyday craziness is ordinary and everyday.  That's what makes it horrible rather than interesting.  Real craziness, like real violence is nasty, frightening, sad and usually embarrassingly stupid.  That's because it's done by us regular folk.  But let it become narrative and it becomes fascinating, deep, intriguing.  Think Crime and Punishment, and then there's the tale about a mother who put soda crystals in her kid's bath in the hope of dissolving her?  There's a wonderfully mad, psychologically gripping story in that.  So much easier than brooding about the reality of the adventures of the mad, greedy, self-righteous men who demanded the invasion of Iraq and the 655,000 (so far) who have died of it.

Bad News for Sentient Beings

Bad news for sentient beings - I'm failing dismally at lovingkindness.  Actually, it's Buddhism I'm failing at, I'm still quite moved by sentience.  Six weeks into a three month online Buddhism course I feel myself slipping away from my resolution to stick with it to the end of the course.  It's like that moment when you begin to fall out of love with someone.  You hang on as if all was well, but it isn't and you can see you're going to have to admit it pretty soon.

Everything was fine when I was sitting twice a day counting breaths, nothing fancy just a bit of concentration.  But then came Lovingkindness practice, and the Precepts.  Compassion meditation is due any day now, and soon Appreciative Joy and the Four Noble Truths.  Oh dear, oh dear.  Aside from the fact that even the idea of being nice makes me feel bilious, I just don't think the world will be a better place if I think nice thoughts.  Anyway, none of it (apart from the concentration exercises) seems to require meditation, so much as a bit of thought and common sense.  The drawbacks of greed, lust, selfishness, killing, lying that the Precepts would have us not do, can all be worked out by a halfway alert brain.  My objection to religion is that it gives metaphysical reasons for elementary social behaviour.  Buddhism tells you that there are consequences to 'unskilful' actions, Christianity and Islam offer you heaven hereafter for being good.  Judaism isn't quite sure about what happens next, but is quite definite about what should happen now.  Buddhism offers broad moral truisms where individual thought ought to be.  People who don't care about social cohesion have long since stopped being frightened of hell or karma.  The secret's out.  Not causing suffering is a choice that you have to decide to make.

But this Lovingkindness business seems indiscriminate.  A blanket proposition.  I can't do Lovingkindness (May they be well, may they be happy, may they attain bliss) but I can manage an ordinary basic respect for life.  My heart-centre gets indigestion at the prospect of understanding why stupid, warmongers (say) are the way they are, and loving their humanity while deploring their actions (Compassion).  I want to be as angry as a human being should be at people who are causing the death of others.  There are, says the teacher on this course, good things happening, as well as bad.  Yes, but bad trumps good, just ask those starving to death or being blown to rags.  Unless, of course, you stop thinking of particulars and deal in broad generalisations designed to justify our pacifity.

All I was really after was a bit of interior silence to listen in to.  A little wilderness at will is what I want.  Quite why, all these years after the Sixties', I should have imagined I could take Buddhist theology any better than any other theology, I don't know.  No, I am not Leonard Cohen, nor was meant to be.  I really must stop coming up with these little projects - as the Poet keeps telling me, they're invariably not exactly what I mean, just a way of fidgeting.  The inner woman will have to settle for whatever secular silence she can find.

Cry me a river

There I was last week being so rude about my gym and their big unavoidable screens.  Today I arrived, stepped on the cross trainer and there right in front of me on the Sky Sport screen was a poker tournament.  Five minutes warm up, 15 minutes on the bike, ten minutes rowing went by unnoticed, with me clocking up unheard of rpms when I bothered to notice.  Then I had to go to the other side of the gym and do weights and machinery stuff where I couldn't see the game. I kept sneaking back between sets and caught the last card of the last hand.  The coolest of the final two lost to an arbitrary river card. 

Now, if they'd had poker for sport at my school, I wouldn't have had anything like so many problems.  I flatly refused to play lacrosse after a few games of gutsy girls coming at me with long sticks at head height while members of my team yelled 'Cradle, cradle!' at me when incredibly I had the ball.  I stood stock still, let the ball drop out of the net, and waited to be battered to death.  My heart was not in it.  I did not want to play, no one wanted me in their team. So I staged an early version of a sit down strike - Bertrand Russell hadn't got there yet - and sat down on the grass refusing to move.  I was sent to the headmaster.  This being a progressive school, the result was not a beating or a detention, but 'the consequence' of being taken five miles out into the Hertfordshire countryside by the Head in his car, let out and told to get back in time for English.  Every games lesson this happened, and I stuffed my cigarettes and matches up my kickers and wandered contentedly back to school over fields and through lanes, puffing on my fag.  It was a satisfactory outcome, but if they'd known that poker was a sport, I'd have been a perfect pupil.

I've been playing online poker for two or three years now.  I lose.  Not heavily - that is I don't play for high stakes, but invariably, in the long run I lose.  Not that I don't get how to play to win, but after I've been canny and ice cold, as ice cold as it's possible to be when you can't see your opponents, for a while, I think, fuck it, I don't want to be smart, I want to gamble.  I've got the wrong temperament.  Awful shame, because what I'd like to be more than anything else (maybe even more than being a writer) is a professional poker player.  Once I wanted to be a song and dance man, but the time has passed for that, and my voice was never any good though I was a whizz of a dancer.  But if I couldn't be Gene Kelly, I'd settle for being Victoria Coren who, after winning some huge poker tournament, is my hero of Autumn 2006.

The thing is I can't really believe that it's not all down to luck, finally.  If you play really tightly so you don't play anything that isn't solid gold it gets tedious.  Anyway, playing odds seems delusional.  If a potential winning hand is 18/1 aren't you still just gambling on happenstance?  2/1 is worth a gamble, but 18/1 or 33/1 is the same as saying maybe, isn't it?  Probability is theoretical.  Poker is real life, cards turning up or not turning up.  Neurological scientists can't help me on this, I think I need a statistician to set me right.  Where is the sense in playing the odds, when the odds are just as likely not to come up even when they're due?  Aren't there odds for an 18/1 hand coming up when it's time for it to come up, if you see what I mean?  Now my head aches.

There's another thing I wasn't good at in school: maths.  Any attempt to manipulate numbers made me cry.  Now it makes me panicky, but I don't have to take any tests - except I suppose in poker.  But I don't risk enough to make it matter.  I suppose logic is the problem.  Logic is a dim, fogbound intuition that I can glimpse, but I can't quite put my finger on.  This is not the result of the disappearance of my neurons (though I suppose it doesn't help), it's just the wiring.  All I need to make me content is not to want to play poker.  But I do, I really do.

Pop, pop, pop - the sequel

Science comes to the rescue and doesn't, once again.  Steven Rose, neurological researcher par excellence, tells me that the sense I have of my brain cells pop, pop, popping into non-existence is not just my imagination or a pretty conceit.  It's a fact, he says:

Yes, they do pop off, those neurons...
nasty business and not much we can do about it 
except to keep on with the crossword puzzles, the
folic acid, aspirin and omega 3s...

I veer between contentment at being right and desolation that I am in fact observing myself (or at any rate my Self) disappear neuron by neuron.  Maybe I'll start keeping a count.  Oops, there goes another one.  Probably as good as crossword puzzling. 
Years ago, I met a silversmith and asked if he could make me a tiny silver clipboard I could wear round my neck on an elegant silver chain (room also for increasingly strong reading glasses) to which I could attach a small notebook on which I could write my intentions every time I prepared to leave one room and go into another.   

Note 1:  I'm in the understairs cupboard to find a cloth
Note 2:  I'm holding this cloth to dry the tea I spilled over my desk
Note 3:  Are you ever going to get on with any work?

And so on.  A beautiful, sad heirloom I thought it might be.  The project came to nothing because we failed to find a small enough writing pad to attach to the tiny clipboard.  Cut up bits of paper would do, I suppose, but I'd probably forget where I put the scissors.

Pop, pop, pop

Brain death has been on the tip of my tongue for some years now.   No day passes between the Poet and me, or a meeting with friends, without some forgetful moment appended with a joke about the Alzheimer's coming on apace.  The deterioration of our brains is a notion as powerful now as the impending doom from an inevitable nuclear blast was in our younger lives.  And in the same way, everyone believes it will happen to them, and no one really believes it will happen to them.  Well, like death, I suppose.  Or viruses.  Or unwanted pregnancy.  Or love.  Or infidelity.  Still, the slow death of the brain haunts my synapses like a man-trapped gazelle biting off its own leg.

I've got the point where I can actually feel the individual cells disappearing.  They burst like bubbles.  Soap bubbles filled with the thought you just had, or speech bubbles filled with what you were just about to say, or the last drop of ink that fails to complete the sentence you were in the middle of writing.  I swear I can sense the empty spaces they leave behind them  Pop, pop, pop.  You neuroscientists can say that what happens to the brain in dementia is nothing like that, but I can hear them bursting.  Pop, pop, pop.

Which shouldn't matter, I suppose.  What isn't there isn't there.  Regret and worry proves that there are enough brain cells remaining to feel regret and worry.  And when there aren't, there'll be nothing to worry with or about.  But I worry on behalf of the future me who is unable to worry.  I don't want to be in a care home that smells of piss, with terrible prints on the wall, spoon fed (if I'm lucky) and with nappy rash.  Of course, I won't mind.  The only regret or discomfort one might have about dumping an irreparable, wrecked car on a street is that of leaving the responsibility for towing it away and dealing with it to others.  The car doesn't care.  It doesn't even have an engine anymore.  But still and still, I brood about the abysmal quality of the pictures on the wall.

All that's really left to upset one are the early stages of watching oneself disappear.  I suppose it shouldn't be more distressing than watching the body decay, or a natural death (whatever that is) come closer simply by virtue of the years passing.  Or by virtue of having been born - some of us were early adopters in the worry business.   But  I have a  fear that  there might be moments of clarity.  Even nanoseconds.  There was a woman in the bin when I was 19 who staggered from chair to chair around the walls of the dayroom holding out a rolled up newspaper and whimpering tunelessly.  That's all she did the live long day, except when the duty nurse couldn't stand it any more and pulled her roughly to an empty chair and shoved her down in it where she stayed and wailed for three minutes before starting her rounds again. ('Stop it,' I once said. 'Leave her alone.'  'Mind your own business,' the nurse told me. 'You're just a patient.')  She was only in her 40s, and suffering from what they called 'pre-senile dementia'.  She had been a multilingual interpreter.   Everyone ignored her.  She stood offering her newspaper for a few moments and when nothing happened moved on to the next non-responder.  Being young and disbelieving in human automata, I sometimes used to take the paper when she offered it to me and thank her.  It only alarmed her.  She would whimper louder and I'd give the paper back.  Occasionally,  between the taking of the paper and the whimper I thought I saw something happen to her eyes.  Not life, but a dim flicker, a half memory of life. 

That's the terrifying thought.  Not the darkness, but the occasional gleam of light.  I hang on to the assumption that when the body stops as well as the mind, the lights go out definitively.  A firm hold on atheism is the only hope I've got.

Hamster Wheels

If they made a gym for old, miserablist, life-refuting types like me, it would be loudspeakerless and screenfree. Just the grim creak of gears and the clang of weights.   Well, maybe a couple of screens in front of the bikes playing Le Chien Andalou and The Red Desert, possibly backwards.  As it is, my gym vibrates with the beat of Life and Fun, in spite of the fact that more than half the punters are over 50 - doubtless there, like me, because their doc told them to or else.  Everyone wears headphones and are probably trying to listen to Tammy Wynette or Frank Sinatra, or Roy Orbison or Thelonius Monk (at any rate I am) above the thud, thud, thudding of the overhead speakers offering the sort of rhythm someone thinks inspires people to exercise.  It inspires me to find a management person and beg him to consider turning down the sound before I get hearing damage trying to blot it out. 

Huge TV screens, unavoidable if you are on a bike, rower or cross trainer, show BBC1, ITV, BBC News 24, Channel 4, MTV and Sky Sport.   From left to right there are people buying or doing up houses, trying to make a killing at the auctioneers, dancing fit to bust, and expressing their dissatisfaction to a studio audience that their sister is a prostitute, while the sister looks on sulkily.  I sit in front of BBC News 24, though that means that MTV is also in my line of vision, where young women are doing things with their bodies that I suppose they think is sexy because they are the kind of things bodies do in bed.  Dancing is, of course, vertical sex, but they look as though they're trying so hard you wish a little middle age on them so they can get a rest. 

The subtitles on News 24 announce that university tuition fees are going up.  I start palpitating with fury and my cycle speeds up at last to the minimum rev I'm supposed to be achieving.  We - that is my lot as well as the government - didn't pay tuition fees, and we got grants that could be lived on.  But the Welsh tuition fees are exempt from the rise, say the subtitles. Because no one wants to be educated in Wales?  Is it a buy one university, get one free offer?  No.  The next subtitle is either a complete non sequiteur or means something: most Welsh students stay in Wales.  So is the idea of cheap tuition fees in Wales a way to keep the Welsh in Wales?  I don't know.  Or could the subtitle writers not think of anything else to say?   If you are listening to Tammy Wynette while you watch the TV you get a very skewed version of the world.  But it has a certain charm.

It's very hard to shut the eyes when cycling, even if you're going nowhere.  It must be some kind of evolutionary throwback that makes you keep your eyes peeled on the move, and evolution never had to plan for bikes that stayed still.  I want a gym that is silent and dark.  The sight of other people making great efforts to lift a pile of weights or row on a stationary steel beam is like hearing people have sex in the next room.  Ugly and ridiculous.  Obviously, it only takes a second to grasp that I'm watching them while I lift a pile of weights etc. and I have to suppose that the sound of me having sex is no prettier or more moving than when I hear them (though of course in fact it is). 

Only two things keep me going back to what I realise I've just described as a hellhole: the endorphins begin to dance as I go through the routine, and I slip into some delightful alpha rhythm mode that is almost as good as beginning to fall asleep; and afterwards there is a spa thing, or a jacuzzi or whatever it's called and a steam room that I get to drift off in equally alphaliwise as a reward for my earlier efforts.   In other words, it is quite like sex, but  without having to take another person into account.  That kind of sex.

My whole aim in life until now has been to find a way of remaining quietly on my sofa while not starving or freezing to death.  It's worked quite well.  Now I'm beginning to think that maybe hamsters have quite a nice life, running round on their endless wheels.  But is it too late for me to change?

Lovingkindness, lack of

I'm fifty-nine which is a foolish age.  At every decade after twenty I've skipped the 9 and gone straight to the next.  So I'm sixty.  And it's almost October.  In the autumn of my autumn.  I need the extra time to get used to it.  I suppose my entire cohort is baffled by it.  Everyone I know is.  Every generation is, I suppose, but mine was peculiarly unsuspecting that they would grow old in the regular way.  Everything was different for us, why not our own trajectories?  First there was the cold war.  We knew that we would die in a nuclear wipe out.  And when we didn't, we celebrated by going to Biba and fitting into tiny clothes that promised us we'd never get old and fat. 

And then it took us so long to grow up.  I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my 30's.  Rock and roll was here to stay.  My daughter grew up with the impression that Mr Tambourine Man was a lullaby.  The Poet didn't have a proper job until he was fifty (so fuck-all pension then).  Reading Kensington Gardens by Fresan - lovely novel playing around with the Sixties generation and J.M.Barrie.  He says that we were the first generation really to  understand Peter Pan because we had got the knack of how never to grow up.  We failed to work out how not to grow old, though, and completely ordinary ageing processes are astonishing us.

Then again it may feel the same for all generations and what my generation is spectacularly good at is making a noise about everything that happens to us.

So now I'm as good as sixty, I thought I might knuckle down to working on the inner woman, as I have been failing to do all my life.  I'm at the gym raising my heartrate and lifting weights three times a week, doing one on one yoga classes, and doing elementary meditation exercises.  I have a short term enthusiasm problem, according to the Poet.  A tiny bit of mania that dances around the depression that I keep at bay with medication and being a writer.  Hardly time to do any work on the novel in between my mental and physical improvement programmes.

It's all going fine except for the meditation.  I'm happy to fail and fail better at mindfulness of breathing.  A nice austerity about it.  But Metta, or Lovingkindness as I can hardly bear to type, is flooring me.  I am not loving or kind.  Somewhere in my chest cavity there is supposed to be a limitless abundance of lovingkindness that can be radiated to individuals, humanity in general, and all sentient beings.  Sentient beings I can manage, just.  The rest, no matter how I put my attention in my heart centre and work at radiating, there's little progress.  Still, I thought there's no harm in trying to be a nicer person, though in truth I'm not sure that's right.  Philip Toynbee who got religion said he only wanted to be with utterly good or utterly bitchy people.  It was a problem for him.  For me too.  But I don't think much has changed in me.  Listening to Blair's conference speech (I am the lost messiah but I will be with you always...') and I was raging again, as I have been since the invasion of Iraq (well, long before).  My heart centre is filled with loathing and venom for the man who has finished Thatcher's dirty work and made socialism of any kind irretrievable.  And the anger extends to the voters who think a devotion to commerce, the market and self-interest has nothing to do with the social and moral absenteeism that is increasingly around.  The sentimental claptrap about Blair's farewell is disgusting, but that's just a cover for the only thing that matters to New Labour, which is being in power at any cost.  There is no fucking point in being in power if you don't improve the lives of people, if you don't redistribute wealth.  I'm sick and ashamed of all of us - and we, my generation, were supposed to be the ones that changed everything because we understood that a life devoted to commercial or political power was not much of a life at all.  The best of us have withdrawn and just diddle about in our own back yards.  The worst are running the world. 

Imagine being my age and still so angry.  Disappointed, of course, that's what is to be expected at five minutes to midnight of a life, but raging anger isn't very grown up, is it?  Well, that's what my lot didn't do, grow up.  Maybe the lovingkindness work will kick in and I'll learn to shrug.