Nick Read

A Right Royal Wedding

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 07:07:56 +0000

What is the secret of the enduring popularity of the British monarchy? What curious alchemy is at work? I can understand why my father, the venerable Read, God rest his soul, was such a fervent monarchist. He was, as he frequently told us, one of Churchill’s few. He fought for King and country, though I doubt the King was that impressed when he wrote off three Hurricanes without even seeing the enemy. It’s enough to make a st-st-statesman st-st-stutter. But sixty years on, and a sequence of public relations disasters, the institution still has the power to generate a sense of awe and respect. It’s not so much what the Royals do - and the chief characters in this enduring soap opera certainly do a lot – it’s what they represent. The Windsors play an essential symbolic role for our nation. They create a collective sense of identity and continuity that we would never get from an ephemeral political leader. They embody consistency and a reaffirmation of traditional values of duty, loyalty, charity, family and community. The Queen is Commander in Chief of the armed forces and head of the Church of England and she brings a softer more human sense to both of those organisations. I once met Prince Charles and was impressed by the way he could work a room and how he raised self deprecation to the status of an art form.

Some say the mere existence of the Royal Family is an affront to democracy. Not a bit of it; they are its upholders. They curb the power of politicians by subsuming the cult of personality from leadership, providing an alternative focus of respect and idealisation that prevents our elected leaders becoming too big for their political boots. So the Royal Family prevent the creation of tyrants, just by being there. The Queen’s in her palace and all’s well with the world.

Next year, The Queen would have been on the throne for 60 years. She acceded in a different time; she has overseen the most amazing changes, not just in terms of historical events or our way of life, but more crucially in our attitudes to all the important things, family, marriage, religion, sexuality. She has stayed firm and uncompromising through it all. She is the same now as she was in 1952. She is the moral anchor for a nation, nay half a world, that has been buffeted by the winds of change. Not only that, but The Queen is latest in a long line that goes back to William the Conqueror; she embodies continuity, representing a historical notion of nationhood that goes back to the very beginning. I don’t know ho children understand history now, but when I was a boy, it all hinged around the Kings and Queens. Like the Observer’s Book of Birds or Ian Allen’s Great Western Railway locomotives (with its 30 Kings, 6000 to 6030), I knew the images of each King and the dates they ruled; I still do. Some knowledge never fades. Our national anthem is not about the power of the state, the revolution, or even the beauty of the country, it is about the monarch – as if The Queen (or King) is the essential symbol of nation and empire. ‘God Save The Queen’. Quite!

Saturday’s Guardian, an organ that hs never admired inherited privilege and power, was so critical of the whole Royal Wedding extravaganza, though they did approve of the royal minibus fleet; the need for cuts and all that! They reminded me of prison vans. In a sense, I suppose, they were.

But there is surely nothing like a Royal Wedding to reaffirm that sense of unity and commitment. In the Church of England, it seems, the beards always have the best words. It was the bald and bearded Bishop of London who emphasised the commitment of marriage (as opposed to just living together) as a potent symbol of unity and responsibility for family, society and the nation, while it was left up to that aging Welsh hippie, Rowan Williams to remind Kate of her responsibility to have a baby, preferably male.

The Germans may sneer at the English for their eccentric attachment to the Windsors, but had it not been for the last century’s two great German wars, they might have still been Saxe-Coburg-Gothas and William might have been assigned a German princess. It was the symbolic significance of the Royal Family, who refused to leave London even though the palace was bombed, as much as Churchill’s indomitable rhetoric that got us through the second war. The Germans began to recognise the flaws in their Fuhrer quite early on. Theirs was not a glorious endeavour; they couldn’t prevail. Our parent’s war had right on its side. So despite the familial dysfunction and the flurry of royal divorces, the Royal Family is nearly as popular now as it was in the 1950s. 80% of the population support it. Maybe it will be different when the Queen dies; there could be a backlash to King Charles and Queen Camilla. Could Kate Middleton will be the one to restore it; she has that quiet sense of dignity, that stability and composure, that regal quality that could capture the nation’s affection and identification.

Friday’s Royal Wedding is a symbol of hope, hope for William and Kate of course, but also for the rest of us, though the cynics will remind us we’ve been here before. 30 years ago, Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. A fairy tale wedding, they called it, but it was more like one of Grimm’s. Charles and Camilla were still exchanging tokens of their affection up until the eve of the wedding. But apparently Prince Philip had insisted Charles choose a virgin and an aristocrat. There were not that many around. So Diana, the nineteen year old insecure daughter of a dysfunctional family, was selected for sacrifice. They hardly knew each other. It was less of a romance and more an arrangement to secure the dynasty. The runes were not good and it ended in tragedy. Kate and William are so different. Theirs’ is a love match, they met at university 10 years ago, they are the same age, they were friends before they became lovers, they have lived together. They are like us, they laugh and joke at the same things and they renew our belief in love and family at a time when cynicism is considered clever.

The are a repository of hope. We can only wish them well.

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Creating the Space

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:59:43 +0000

Art is not just a pleasing arrangement of shapes, textures and colours; it can only be properly appreciated in its cultural context. So-called ‘Conceptual’ artists use imagery to explores a theme that resonates with and provides insight into contemporary culture. In an age of internet dating and casual sex, Tracey Emin dares to explore female lust. Damien Hirst, on the other hand, expresses a more ordered corporate theme, in which feelings, emotions are put into boxes and bottles and categorised. But isn’t all art conceptual? Maybe historical notions of art were much more limited to religious imagery, myth, society portrait and landscape, but like classical musicians, each artist interpreted those concepts according to the fashion and spirit of the age. Likewise The Romantics, Turner’s misty decaying ruins alongside the engines of the industrial revolution, the pre-Raphaelite expression of the Victorian tension between spirituality and sexuality expressed the way the artist saw them as an instrument of the prevailing culture. But increasingly art has come to represent political and social themes. The Spanish artists, Picasso’s Guernica, Miro’s burnt canvases screamed their outrage at the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps photojournalism occupies the same niche nowadays. One well constructed image is worth a thousand words.

So art changes as the social environment changes. But the artist also helps to create that environment by conceptualising aspects of culture in images and structures. So art is a medium to help people gain insight and understanding of their culture as expressed through the expressive perspective of one individual.

Of course, the creation of the artist says as much if not more about them as it does about the culture (though they are still a representative of the culture). Successful artists can be and often are self centred to the point of obsession; you might say they have to be. And in a narcissistic age, some art has self indulgent to the point of boredom. Do we really want to know so much about Tracey’s soiled bed, used condoms or how many men she fucked in her tent? Are we interested in the relationship with Louise Bourgeois’ father and her governess? In as much as it informs us about aspects of culture and psychology we are. Louis Bourgeois depicted a whole psychoanalysis in her art. Joseph Beuys went one stage further; he invented a fantastic personal narrative through his art; catapulted from his crippled Stuka when it crashed in deep snow in Crimea in 1944, he claims to have been rescued by Tartar tribesman, who kept him alive by wrapping his broken body in felt and animal fat and feeding him milk. His art reflects aspects of that incident as well the boundary between fantasy and reality.

Other artists use their experience to express something wider, more general, while maintaining the template of their formative life experience to fashion a recognisable identity-in-style. Henry Moore drew large female figures with holes in them to represent his fixation on the beloved, though at times distant mother; there were gaps in their relationship. .

Some artists are more blatently commercial in their adherence to culture; they generate shapes, ideas that people want. Anish Kapoor creates large reflecting surfaces, bulges, wax installations, that people enjoy. ‘Art is not meant to be controversial’, he recently declared. He likes to be liked.

Art doesn’t so much create the object, it creates the environment, the mental space through which the rest of us can think about their own existence. In doing so, it both represents the culture and helps to create it. The process can be transformative, but for some artists it can become iterative and hermetic, the unending scratching, etching of an itch until something changes to change the focus; war, famine, love.

Some art will travel; either because it expresses a universal theme, like love, or because its meaning is so meaningfully abstract, so that people from different cultures bring their own meaning to it. Shakespeare travels and so does Turner. Is this what makes art great? Is this the function of art; to create the space for the thoughts of others to enter. In our instant, media culture, people are often considered clever because they say what everybody else is thinking and wish they had said it. They re clever because they make everybody feel clever. Is that what artists do; set down a challenge that makes the rest of us feel clever by gaining insight? If so, they don’t necessarily do it deliberately.

‘They tell me it’s great art. To me, it was just another scribble’

It’s always good to talk to my brother; he is an artist and gets me to think out of the box!

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All Change, Please

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:53:38 +0000

Life is a constant process of modification and adaptation, The basis of our identity is forged early on through the interaction with our parents. Our whole world is our family, our home. But then as we grow, become more independent, explore our environment, other people and situations influence us; extended family, friends, school, holidays, university, marriage, job; they all accrete to our personality to form a distinct, recognisable identity. But it doesn’t stop there. We continue to remodel our personality throughout our life. This usually occurs by a gradual process of evolution, but it sometimes occurs more dramatically by crisis and revolution.

So what is it that changes us? The simple answer is experience; the things that happen. If the environment changes, then we either adapt and grow or we stay put, stuck in the past. Not all events change us, of course; most of what happens can be accommodated within the confines of our experience and serve only to reinforce our view of the world. But occasionally, we encounter someone or live through some situation that so outside our experience that we are forced to adjust our whole way of thinking to incorporate it.

Change is an emotional interaction. Things that are different challenge, excite, shock, frighten and even depress us. If we engage with them, we may feel envious, guilty, ashamed or angry. Sometimes we may be able to change the situation, but more often than not, we can’t; the only thing we can change is ourselves. Working through, coming to terms with, are the processes of change; the reconstruction of the personality that develops out of emotional crisis. So if something affects us, makes us think and feel, then we are changed by it. Change is instigated by emotion. We fall out with somebody, argue, disengage, fume, but then later, sometimes much later, we pause, start to see it from their point of view, and reconcile our differences. We are changed by what has happened.

‘Love changes everything’, wrote Andrew Lloyd Webber. Such a deep emotional identification with another human being results in coalescence, a blending of experience that changes both. Change requires an interaction, an exchange. We are social beings; other people change us. Conflict and love; we are changed by sharing of intense emotional experience.

But it’s not just direct emotional experience that changes us. We can be adjusted by culture. Art, literature, science, technology, religion, politics are all agents of cultural change. They facilitate change in ourselves by altering the emotional environment. They can rearrange the way societies perceive their existence and influence the choices they make. Somebody proves that God no longer exists or that world is finite, and suddenly the restrictions of people’s behaviour are lifted and they change. The ability to communicate instantly with somebody at the other side of the world, the way we experience war, earthquakes and tsunamis in the comfort of our living room as they are happening, the way we can shop, pay bills, book holidays, conduct our jobs without leaving home; all off this has altered the way we are.

Governments, yes even Conservative governments, are agents of social change; they change the social environment by legislature and the people have to move into it.

Architects also change the social environment. Geoff Cohen said on Radio 4 last week that good architecture must not only be functional, it has to create hope and space for emotional development. Jaume Plensa (currently at The Yorkshire Sculpture Park) creates environments for peace and meditation as well as exciting spaces where change can happen. His sets for opera create such dramatic possibilities.

Change the environment, change the meaning. If we move away, get another job, we mix with a whole new social group and we are changed. If we separate from our partner, move on, marry someone else, we become a different person. Relationships change people, probably more than anything else. Parents and teachers create the environment/space in which children can grow, but eventually the child has to separate. A good teacher or parent equips the child to take advantage of the opportunity. By the same token, psychotherapy can expands perception and creates possibilities for change, but only the individual can change. You not only need space to change, you need courage to take advantage of the opportunity. And the good enough parent, teacher or therapist, must facilitate a safe environment for the person to develop with confidence and not seek to overprotect and confine through selfishness and fear.

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Intimations of Hope

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:49:33 +0000

The idealistic Konstantin, humiliated by his famous mother, the actress Irina Arkidina, his play publicly dismissed as ridiculous, tries to shoot himself but instead shoots a seagull and presents the corpse to Nina, the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, whom he adores. Nina is disturbed and disgusted, but shows it to the sinister Trigorin, a famous writer and house guest, who notes down the metaphor for future use. Nina is in thrall to Trigorin. She sees in him an opportunity to escape the cage of the family estate and take flight as an actress. She follows Trigorin to Moscow, becomes pregnant and is rejected by the writer who is being kept by Irina. The baby dies, her family lock their gates against her, and she is transformed into the kind of tragic heroine that the painter, George Frederick Watts depicted in his allegorical studies of hope and poverty. She becomes the seagull.

Watts had taken as his child bride the teenage actress, Ellen Terry, in order to protect her from the same fate, or so the story goes. The marriage failed. It was supposedly never consummated. According to the amusing fiction by Lynne Truss, Watts just wasn’t interested in her that way. Released from Watts’ protection, Ellen soared upwards to become the most famous actress of her generation.

The Seagull possesses the usual Chekhovian themes; the country house, a self indulgent Russian bourgeoisie, decadent, bored and in decline, the threatening clouds of the oncoming revolution And the actors have the same familiar roles, the ageing actress and matriarch playing to the balcony while the theatre crumbles around her, the elderly and ailing uncle, the owner of the estate, representing old Russia about to vanish forever, the frustrated and bullish farm manager, fed up with the old ways and wanting progress, the desperate young author, the naive and fragile girl, and the doctor, perhaps Chekhov himself, a reflective observer, not entirely engaging with it all. Soon all will be scattered. Seen from this perspective, the seagull presents a broader perspective on the oncoming crisis, a fragile but beautiful way of life soon to be chopped down like The Cherry Orchard. Of course, the characters seem hysterical and self centred, they are all in love with love as a form of escape, the end of their world is coming; what else can they do? It wouldn’t be theatre if they all behaved sensibly and worked together.

The Seagull is currently playing at the Arcola Theatre in Stoke Newington; not an area I know well but accessible via the London Overground. The theatre is a converted warehouse. The set and seating are rough and ready but the cast and direction is as accomplished as many productions you might see in the West End. Geraldine James plays the actress and matriarch. The doctor is played by Roger Lloyd Peck, recently seconded from the Dibley parish council. Chekhov billed the play as a comedy but nobody in Stoke Newington was laughing.

The Watts Gallery opened at Compton on the North Downs outside Guildford on June 18^th. It is said to be the only major gallery in the country devoted to a single artist. Watts was immensely popular in his heyday; two rooms were devoted to his paintings in the newly opened Tate Gallery at Millbank but the fashion for Victorian art changed and by the nineteen fifties you could pick up his paintings for less than a hundred pounds. His museum at Compton fell into disrepair but was rescued by coming second in the BBC’s Restoration programme and then getting a 4 million pound lottery grant. Watts’ paintings are not exactly cheerful. The most famous are allegories of themes like hope, poverty and despair. They are sombre and intense; Watts saw his mission to produce work that encourage young people to think about moral issues.

Lynne Truss didn’t treat Watts kindly. In her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which described with humour the characters that circled the bard of Farringford, she portrayed him as self obsessed and sexually repressed. Who knows, if he had been more responsive to Ellen’s allures, she may never have felt the need to escape to the stage.

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Two’s company,three’s a couple. Betrayal; the anatomy of an affair.

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:44:12 +0000

At the beginning of a love affair, one might ask oneself either ‘what am I getting into’ or ’what am I getting out of?’ Every entrance is an exit. The only real question is, ‘Are we going to go through (with it)?’

The pivotal moment in Emma and Jerry’s seven year long affair occurred just two years into it. Emma was sitting on the bed in the Kilburn flat they had bought together, excited to see him again, when wistfully, nonchalantly but not so, she said. ‘Are we going to change our lives?’ There was a pause. Then Jerry replied, ‘we can’t’. That was it; the start of the illness from which the relationship succumbed.

They were both in their thirties, married, their children were still young; they had their obligations. The time was crucial. For Emma and Jerry, thirty plus represented a loss of freedom, the acquisition of responsibility. No longer, it seemed, would life hold that frisson of possibility; it now stretched ahead, that slow decline of disillusion.

In the affairs of men and women, time is of the essence. It both offers the opportunity and then snatches it away. That chance meeting, the inventive creation of space, free afternoons, rendezvous snatched between appointments; at the time, it seems their love could last forever; feeling expands time. But in real time, such intensity of passion is ephemeral.

Falling in love is predicated on hope, and hope cannot be sustained forever. If the affair goes on too long without a resolution, then hope dies. The fulcrum of reality is followed by the inevitable winding down of the clock to when time together, like the flat Emma and Jerry rented, becomes empty and meaningless. If an affair doesn’t go anywhere, if it doesn’t change the lives of the participants, it will die and something in them will die too.

The happily married never need consider these issues. As the philosopher and psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, comments, for them the future is the same as the past. ‘Outwitting time and change, they construct a monument to continuity among the promiscuous ruins. Valuing a relationship because it lasts, they live as if time proves something.’

It was a poignant and clever device for Pinter to write the play backwards; time running in reverse. The end of an affair is always there right at the start. They both knew it was impossible that first time they kissed at the party; that’s what made it so risky and exciting. They couldn’t! But why not? They were in love. And love skews perception, makes the impossible seem plausible.

Except it’s not. Life is not make-believe, however much we may try to make it so. There are incompatibilities; the taken-for-granted and the precarious, the tedious routine and the impossible risk – the thing that couldn’t be done. There is safety and danger, habit and passion, love and lust, attachment and desire, marriage and affairs. Of course we want to have our cake and eat it. Why not, we protest, we are integrated beings. Isn’t our body but a representation of our meaningful soul and isn’t our mind the way we think about it? Why can’t we be more honest?

But in the affairs of men and women, honesty and kindness are at odds with each other, Phillips asserts. ‘We lie because we can’t admit our desire and we don’t wish to hurt or be hurt. We lie in order to keep our options open, but also to find out what our options are. The successful lie creates a fragile freedom. It shows us that it is possible for no one to know what we are doing, even ourselves. The poor lie – the wish to be found out – reveals our fear about what we can do with words. Fear of infidelity is fear of language.’

Monogamy is reassurance. It’s like believing in God. Not everyone believes, but most live as though they do. Erotic life, Phillips writes, is political, disruptive; ‘it rearranges the world, it makes a difference to the ways we and other people organise their lives. Every infidelity creates the need for an election; every separation divides the party. Friends may share, cooperate and be honest. Lovers have to do something else. Lovers cannot be virtuous.’

Rules by which we govern our lives are ways of imagining what to do. ‘Our personal infidelity rituals – the choreography of our affairs – are parallel texts of our marriages’. Successful affairs reproduce the loneliness of marriage. Unsuccessful ones intensify it. Serial monogamy, it could be argued, keeps us moving on, maintaining the hope, restoring meaning and renewing life.

Adam Phillips would claim that ‘guilt, by reminding us what we mustn’t do, shows us what we may want. It shows us our moral sense, the difference between what we want and what we want to want. Without the possibility of a double life, there is no morality. Because we are always being sexually faithful to somebody, every preference is a betrayal.’

He continues, ‘what is coupledom, but a sustained resistance to the intrusion of third parties. The couple needs to sustain the third parties in order to go on resisting them. The faithful keep an eye on the enemy, eye them up. After all, what would they do together if no one else was there. How would they know what to do? Two’s company; three’s a couple. Everyone feels jealous or guilty and suffers the anguish of their choices. No one has ever been excluded from feeling left out.’

Betrayal by Harold Pinter is currently playing at the Comedy Theatre, London. Kristin Scott Thomas is wonderful as Emma; she was sexy, playful and very attractive; how could Jerry ever resist her. The programme included notes from Adam Phillips Book, Monogamy (Faber and Faber, 1996).

(please don’t read this as a moral statement, more an attempt at analysis)Two’s company

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In the Mind’s Eye

Nick Read — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:30:46 +0000

At the age of 14, Rene witnessed his mother, being pulled out of the river; her lower body was exposed and her nightdress was over her head concealing her face. Was it her, and if it wasn’t where had she gone, what had happened? But Rene never talked about it; he didn’t trust words. He just expressed it through the medium he had control of; painting. He was an artist philosopher. Perhaps all ‘creative’ artists are. What is art, if not visual metaphor?

Rene Magritte just took it further. His painterly skill allowed his imagination the freedom to use the image to describe the thought. His images express the way the mind connects ideas. They have a dream like quality because that’s how our mind sees things when we are not fixed by the consciousness of real time and space and the rules of language. So like dreams, his images break the rules, size is relative, shape distorted, there are impossible associations. In The Dominion of Light, he merges light and day, street lights illuminate a street against a bright afternoon sky, a bird flies over a dark sea, its shape filled in by a bright cloudy sky. A crescent moon is placed in painted in front of the dark tree, the artist creates the woman by painting her, the landscape on the canvas becomes the view, the window pane breaks up into pieces of the landscape viewed through it, a couple kiss with cloths over their heads, an act of intimacy between two people who are concealed from each other.

The theme of concealment dominates his work. He creates illusion by representation. Magritte liked a mystery, the anonymous detectives in bowler hats coming to arrest and assailant, the woman’s body on the operating table, the same bowler-hatted figures of differing sizes descending like rain in front of the buildings of his home town.

Magritte wasn’t so much looking for meaning, he was more interested in the process of how we represent ideas; he wanted to express ideas as he perceived them. Our mind, as the extension of the vast neuronal network that is our brain, makes connections between ideas and actions and feelings. Having conceived of a certain way of thinking, we return to it again and again, establishing neural connections like paths through the forest. But our mind’s reality makes connections which are impossible in the real world. Magritte shows us the way our mind thinks about things. So a pipe is not always a pipe but represents something much more potent, a carrot morphs into a bottle, a bird becomes part of the sky, clouds are like object and thoughts.

Magritte recognised how words condition our thought, fixing and channelling the meaning, so he experimented with different words for objects. Words tell us what an object is, but our mind sees other connotations. Poetry plays with this idea. It explores the power of words, but also their limitations. Freud and Jung explored the same territory in their papers on symbolism and dream, but at least Freud had the honesty to admit that ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’.

Magritte, The Pleasure Principle, is currently being exhibited at Tate Liverpool on Albert Dock.

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Moorland concerto

Nick Read — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:18:42 +0000

Was there ever a more thrilling ensemble?

The wild whoops and daring dives not of the solo violin,

But the rolling tumbling, death defying lapwings.

The woodwind section, a haunting of curlew,

their querulous ascent and curdling decline,

a wild race of whistling oystercatchers,

the redshank that pipes and dips from the wall.

The choir, an alchemy of plaintive plover,

banking gold and white and back to gold again,

the skylarks locked in their trilling elevators

and the paragliding squeaking of pipits,

the brass is the honking pairs of greylag geese on morning patrol,

percussion, the humming, thrumming, drumming of roller coaster snipe.

All this, while wheatears, that slate and primrose spring

take silent ownership of cup and ring.

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How you make me feel; projection and its identification.

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:06:44 +0000

Why do we trust some people and not others? Why do we admire some people? Why do some people make us uncomfortable? Is it because they remind us of significant figures in our lives; our mother, our father, a brother or sister, a lover, a husband, wife, a teacher? Are they suitable objects for our projections?

Projection is a ubiquitous feature of human nature. It is the cornerstone of evolution; what makes us human; the effect of an opposable thumb. As soon as we could throw, we could make things happen; we could control the future (see Projection, the missile of evolution. December 24^th, 2010), but this required us to perform the mental trick of imagination; to think the way things might be, to make believe.

Psychological projection performs that same mental trick, it transfers what we feel onto somebody else, to imagine it is they who have those some feelings and attitudes. So we protect ourselves from psychic damage by projecting the bad stuff onto those we recognise already possess some of the characteristics we want to get rid of. ‘She’s just so selfish.’ ‘I can’t trust him’. He’s so lazy, careless, unreliable, fussy, messy. This happens all the time. Just listen to how ‘a gossip of girls’ on the train criticise absent ‘friends’. Look at how politicians try to achieve a semblance of dominance and control by rubbishing their competitors; how newspapers take hold of that and amplify it. But it’s not just bad stuff. Idealisation is a kind of projection. When we admire somebody, respect somebody, fall in love with somebody, we transfer our wishes for how would like to be onto that person. They become a mentor, a role model, an object of desire.

Projection starts, like everything else, in childhood. Children deal with uncomfortable feelings like fear and anger by externalising them. First identify your enemy, locate all the bad stuff into them and then you can justify an attack. Or identify the one you admire, locate all your wishes in that person and make them your best friend. Projection is a mental trick. There are goodies and baddies; in my childhood these were cowboys and Indians; the English and the Germans. How differently you see things as you grow up. Maturity is a state of recognising the bad feelings, taking them back and containing them, realising that what we criticise in other people is also part of us, accepting our essential humanity.

Groups, organisations, institutions, governments, states, do it all the time. They are pathologically split; they operate at a very childlike manner and project all their own concealed characteristics, especially the bad ones like unreliability, inadequacy, lack of sophistication, to say nothing of selfishness and ruthlessness onto their competitors. Colonel Gadaffi is currently the embodiment of all evil though only a few years ago, he was our special friend. But the only thing that’s changed is our own projections. Members of an exclusive culture, music critics, art enthusiasts, historians, theatre buffs, vintage car collectors, can tend to puff themselves up by broadcasting their lacunae of esoterica to an audience they assume knows nothing and can be diminished by their ignorance.

But projection can only really work in society if others identify with it. This is what the psycholanalysts (another in- group) call projective identification or to put it in everyday speak, ‘how others make us feel’. In voodoo, pointing the bone can cause others to feel so guilty by inference whether they are or not, that they slink away and die. They have been ostracised from the tribe; they are not worthy to belong anymore and they cannot therefore survive. Social exclusion is a powerful force; guilt and shame, powerful identifications. People who have done something shameful to attract the projections of others, who use it as a shield for their own shame. And it’s always the ones with most to be ashamed of that seek out those they can offload on to. Those who feel unhappy make those who are close to them unhappy too

Projective identification operates in so many aspects of human behaviour. Bullies can’t contain their own fear, so they make others frightened of them. Suspicious people are secretive and engender mistrust and lies. Needy people cannot give and induce need in others. Those who are envious put on airs and graces to try to make others envy them. Lovers who feel insecure may do something to make their partners feel jealous. Unhappy and lonely people make those who are close to them unhappy too because at least they are toegether in their misery. Teachers, who are not confident, can make their students feel stupid, but equally the over-confident student can make a teacher defensive. ‘You make me feel sick, you make me so angry, you just make me depressed.’ These are all common identifications within relationships.

Those who carry a grudge are attracted to political groups, but can be very dangerous because they can cause others to feel bad and act out. So did Ian Brady make Myra Hindley do it. Projective identification is never a justification in law but it happens.

War is mutual projection as each side used propaganda to unsettle the other. Sport is the same. Winning the mental battle wins the war or the tennis match. Do not flinch; maintain the upper hand. And we the observers so want the underdog, the good guy to win, we will do all we can to inspire him with our enthusiasm. It almost worked with Tim and we’re trying our best with Andy, the nearly men of British tennis.

Some doctors are so anxious they can make their patients terrified. Michael Balint, the author of ‘The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness’ recognised this. Patients pass the anxiety of not knowing what’s wrong with them on to the doctor, so that he orders more tests in order not to appear a failure. Or their attitude may make their doctors feel angry, depressed, tired. Emotional transference is such a powerful phenomenon. As a therapist, I had always marvelled at how one client could make me feel so wound up and energetic; the next so tired I could fall asleep and have actually done so, but they were lying on the couch and I was sitting behind them and they never noticed.

Actors are masters of projection. They tune into their audience and can make us all identify with the emotions they project. I have had two actors in therapy. One made me feel so angry, I actually had chest pain and needed to ask him to leave. The other made me feel such surges of desire and compassion, it was all I could do not to take her in my arms and love her right there and then.

But it’s not all negative. We can also use projection to bring out the best in people. Look at the way babies project their hunger onto their mother, who identifies with it and feeds them. Falling in love feeds upon itself. We project our beliefs and feelings into those whom we love and if they love us too and are a suitable object for our projection, they identify our desire and act in a way that intensifies it.

Lovers give each other those feelings of security, excitement, togetherness, they’ve been looking for all their life, but what then happens to the bad feelings? Well, if they can never let this love become as imperfect as the rest of life, then these feelings are projected out onto others, and the exclusive couple clings together united against the world, unable to trust anybody else. But most marriages are not like that. They are states of mutual projection and identification, and partners try to look after their own well being by making their partners shoulder the blame and feel bad. You never think! You’re totally selfish! I just can’t rely on you. In a way they need the other to get rid of the bad feelings. When it works well, it’s a trade off. One may make the other feel alive while the other projects a feeling of safety. It works. The problems come when one of them changes the dynamic; meets somebody else, suffers a setback that destroys their confidence, accepts a job that satisfies their needs.

Projective identification requires us to think. When somebody behaves angrily or badly to us, we need to reflect on our own attitude and behaviour and the reason for it. How did it all start? What was the trigger, the fear? We all have responsibility in our functioning society to bring out the best in people, the most constructive response, but in a narcissistic, self seeking society, people all too often have to have their own way, because ‘we’re worth it’. It may be unfashionable to say, but I do believe that we have the friends, the colleagues, the children and the relationships we deserve because we help to make them the way they are for us

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I believe in miracles

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:01:26 +0000

There was a kind of magic that earlier spring, under the Quantock ridge, where Hope Corner Lane crossed the Kingston Road.

If we left home early in the half light, before breakfast, the white owl would still be ghosting alongside the hedgerows on silent wings to take a last late vole to the shadow of the barn. And there in the garden of the big house, behind the wall, a fairy woodpecker, red head and ladder back would be fidgeting his way up the tall trees.

Alas, the house has been demolished; the barns pulled down, the birds gone, even the chinking of Corn Buntings in the fields. The spectral owl still hunts in the wildernesses, but the fairy woodpecker is a figment, an image torn from a book, a trace in the memory.

Fifty three more springs have passed. And then on Thursday, lying in sharvasana (the corpse posture) under the tall beeches on the Tumps, I heard a soft regular tapping, more like a snore or the purr of a contented cat, and a high pitched call repeated three times. I opened my eyes and caught a flutter as a tiny bird, no bigger than a sparrow but more fragile, moved to another dead limb and rattled a different pitch. I focussed; the same white stripes, the red cap, the cheek patches and I believed in miracles.

The Lesser Spotted Woodpecker has declined by more than 90% in the last fifty years in the UK and cross Europe. There are now fewer than 2000 pairs left in Britain. At least two pairs are present amid the deer and open woodland in Chatsworth Park. The British Trust for Ornithology identifies the possible reasons for its decline as competition with and predation by Great Spotted Woodpeckers, and reductions in small-diameter dead wood suitable for foraging, while the species’ large home ranges suggest that landscape-scale changes in woodland (loss of mature broadleaved woodland, losses of non-woodland trees such as elms, and woodland fragmentation) may also be important (Fuller et al. 2005).

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Gabrile Orozco; meaning out of chaos.

Nick Read — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:36:53 +0000

Gabriel Orozco is like his ball of plasticine, Yielding Stone 1992, rolling along, always on the move, always picking up new ideas, things from the streets, imprints, objects, impressions. He installs whatever he thinks is interesting, often distorting them to remove their utility, change their function, so that they engage more closely with the viewer as a work of art, a receptacle for meaning. In one installation (Lintels 2001), he gathered the plaques of felt from the filters of spin dryers, with their residues of hair, nails, grit and paper, and hung up on wires like washing lines. When this was exhibited in New York in November 2001, the ash coloured skins of lint with their message of the transience of human life, took on a poignant significance; something about the residues, the impermanence of life. In Carambola with pendulum 1996, he distorts the billiard table and suspends one ball on a wire so that it swings over the table. The players make up their own rules; hit the other white ball into the swinging red, strike the red so that it swings high over the edge of the table, position the other white ball so that it is in the path of the red. In Dial Tone, 1992, he slices the pages of the New York phone book and places the anonymous digits next to one another on a 10 metre roll of Japanese paper. It’s a measure of the city. In La DS, 1993, he cuts a Citroen car in three pieces, removes the central section and rebuilds the car in an aerodynamic form without an engine. It’s beautiful, creates an impression of a contender for the land speed record, but totally useless.

Orozco loves to play, to invent, he is fascinated by the meaning in everyday things, as a child would. While he was artist in residence in Berlin, he bought a yellow Schwalbe, a motor scooter, and then roamed the city looking for a partner, another yellow motor scooter, photographing the pair wherever they met (Until you find another yellow Schwalbe 1995). In a five star hotel in India, he was given three rolls of toilet paper, so he fixed them to the arms of the fan in his room, so that the paper streamed out with the rotation like pennants, and danced to it, Ventilator 1997.

Orozco explores the pattern of things, their organisation from chaos, their reordering into art. He collects the bits of blown out tires he finds at the side of the motorway and arranges them like black crocodiles on a white sheet of paper, Chicotes 2010. In Black Kites, he imposes order on death by inscribing a geometrical black and white grid on a human skull. As a child, he was obsessed with planetary motion, the orbits, ellipses, circles. This obsession appears in his work, in Samurai Tree and Atomist Series 2006 and Four Bicycles; there is always one direction 1994, in which he slots four bicycles together, so that the wheels rotate in different directions. It might be a comment on the ambivalence of life.

There is something touching and personal in Oroczo’s work, he is not afraid of expressing his childlike self, exposing his vulnerability. This is perhaps most movingly expressed in My hands are my heart, 1991, in which he shapes a lump of clay, of the same colour as his skin, with his hands then has this photographed against his chest, exposing, as it were, his heart.

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